Sony's post-hacking "Welcome Back" program may have boosted PS3 sales

Could Sony's awful hacking debacle have actually helped PS3 sales? That's the story according to research company EEDAR, which says that there was a silver lining to the outage that hit the PS3.

Sony's Welcome Back program was intended to assuage the legions of PS3 owners irate not because their data was stolen but because they could not play their favorite games online. To this end, Sony offered PS3 owners a two out of four possibile titles: Infamous, LittleBigPlanet, Dead Nation and WipEout.

All of these titles, EEDAR says, were in top 25 of PS3 game acquisitions in June, meaning that either the games experienced a unrelated resurgence in popularity, or quite a few PS3 owners jumped at the chance to get them for free via the "Welcome Back" program.

Similarly, EEDAR notes that there was a big increase in the number of PS3 owners who said they had bought a digital title in June: 17% in June 2011, compared to 13% in March.

The PlayStation 3 also nabbed 44% of software acquisitions in June. In comparison, the PS3 only claimed 40% of titles acquired in March before the PSN outage.

EEDAR also argues that interest in the free titles spiked interest in their sequels, which the research company says could be a viable strategy for game companies in the future. Let's just hope it doesn't take another PSN outage for Sony to feel the same way.

You can read the EEDAR report here.