Various UK Retailers Are Reporting An Increase In PlayStation 3 Trade-Ins Since The PSN Outage.

That's causing a lot of PS3 owners to lose patience and trade-in their systems, according to a report published by EDGE. The report cites a number of UK retail clerks, and paints a disturbing picture of the current PS3 climate: trade-ins have essentially doubled over the past few weeks, as "hardcore" Call Of Duty players switch to the XBOX 360 for their fix.

While we imagine these trade-ins represent a very small sample of the install-base, it's still food for thought. While some players can get by without online multiplayer, for a lot of people that's the core of their gaming experience. It's hard to blame those people for jumping ship, even if it does seem a bit premature.

Sony really needs to get things back online sharply. Even our confidence is starting to waver, and we've been pretty committed to defending the platform holder over the past few weeks. Clearly the hack was a criminal activity of which Sony are the victims. But the company's communication over the past few days has been less than stellar, and that's harder to forgive than the actual data breach.

If anyone reading this is considering trading in, you might want to wait until tomorrow: there's a major announcement coming in the morning.