The PlayStation Network has been offline for more than three weeks, but despite the outage, April saw an increase in PlayStation 3 sales. According to a Sony statement from Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications at SCEA, NPD reported a 13 percent April increase for hardware sales and 40 percent year-over-year increase in software sales.

"We continue to see a lot of great momentum at the retail level, and appreciate the support we've received from our partners, retailers and customers since the criminal attack on the PlayStation Network," Seybold said. "We hope to have services restored as soon as we can."

Of course, April had 20 days to sell PS3s before the outage occurred, so the real test of consumer loyalty and the impact of this outage will come next month when May's sales are revealed.

I just found this on IGN and was really amazed with it and thought I would share it with you guys. I think one of the reasons sales are is because there are a lot of people that don't know that PSN is down. Such as some 10 year old who just get it for their birthday. And of course people working at the store where you bought from aren't gonna tell you PSN is down because they want to make money. They don't care if they sell you a broken PS3.

A 13% increase is actually really big even though PSN is down. IA lot of places also have them on sale at a low price so that is also a major factor.We will have to see if there sales percentages drop or rise in the next few months. When Sony brings PSN back online that will change a lot in there sales depending on how the re-launch goes. If it goes good and they give us some good stuff then sales should remain steady. Now if the re-launch is a failure (which it probably will be) sales will probably drop because the news will spread pretty quick about how bad Sony's public relations are. Personally I don't think there sales will stay up.

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