10 Biggest Gaming News Stories That Shocked The World

Depending on who you ask, gaming is either awesome or probably the devil cloaked in polygons. It's an immensely popular industry, but it's also incredibly divisive and there's a massive stigma attached to gaming itself. This stigma tends to become most prevalent when something goes wrong in the industry; within minutes the media has latched onto games causing something bad to happen and there's uproar about what's going on. Most gamers just shrug it off, but there's been several moments in history where gaming has brought about such huge stories that we sometimes have to step back and just say, "Yep, that was bad." On the other side of the coin, some of the news stories that shock the world are actually complete nonsense and routinely blown out of proportion by people who haven't done their research and end up having to eat their words. It's a delicate balance, but there are plenty of examples of big gaming-related things that shocked the world; it's time to delve into the 10 of these that really caused quite a ruckus.

10. The Sony PSN Hack

Given that Sony have spent the past year or so doing everything they can to make gamers love them, it's important to remember that just a few years back they really screwed up and caused a lot of trouble when the Playstation Network was hacked, compromising millions of user's credit card details. This wasn't, of course, Sony's fault. They didn't ask to be hacked, but the manner in which they dealt with it - not telling anyone anything about what was happening or whether information had been compromised - really wasn't a good idea either. As a gamer, it felt like you were just sitting in the dark, completely internetless on your PS3 and not knowing if some evil-doer somewhere was using your information to steal your money. Taking place in April 2011, the PSN outage was instantly jumped on by mainstream media, causing it to appear on everything from the BBC to other major news outlets. Gamers everywhere were annoyed at having their service compromised but the world was shocked that a data breach of this magnitude (which potentially could have affected 77 million-plus user accounts) could have taken place in modern society. As a result of the outage Sony suffered fines, government criticism and legal action by several parties after the hacks were deemed preventable. It was an unfortunate time for everyone involved but there were many errors made here and the whole situation could have been handled better. In fact it actually took Sony SIX days to tell people after the initial intrusion was even detected!