The PlayStation 4 Anniversary Edition was theirs, as they had earned them by purchasing Sony gaming devices within the one-month window. However, Sony says it accidentally erased the list of contest winners and it doesn't have a way to recover the information.
The good news is that the winners hadn't been notified that they had won the raffle, leaving all eligible parties to merely wonder about what may have been the results. Sony apologized for the fumble on its Japanese language website, and Kotaku's Toshi Nakamura shared the translation:
"Our deepest apologies for the trouble we have caused to those who entered the previous campaign."
Adding to the good news, Sony says no consumer data was compromised as a result of the incident. It doesn't know exactly how it did it, but it simply deleted the contest information by accident, Sony says.
One more bit of good news, Sony says eligible customers can re-enter the contest and take another shot at being gifted one of the anniversary edition PlayStation 4 units.
To be eligible, entrants must have purchased Sony gaming hardware -- PS4, PS3, PS Vita or Vita TV -- between Dec. 4, 2014 and Jan. 15 of this year.
Sony has produced only 12,300 units of the special edition PlayStation 4, setting aside 123 of them for the contest promo, which was limited to Japan.
Along with bouts with PlayStation Network outages, the fumbling over the anniversary contest may chip at Sony's reputation all the more. According to Nielsen, Sony's dominance with this console generation hasn't won it more brand loyalty than its rivals.
In a report on lifetime console ownership and the factors driving purchases, Nielsen concluded that about 66 percent of PlayStation 3 owners picked up Sony's latest console. While about 76 percent of Xbox 360 and approximately 86 percent of Wii owners picked up Microsoft and Nintendo's latest consoles, a telling sign even when accounting for the people who purchased multiple consoles in a single generation.
Nielsen also reported that Xbox One owners pointed to "brand" as their top reason for picking up Microsoft's latest console. Brand didn't rank in the top 6 reasons among Sony PlayStation owners or those who own Nintendo Wii U consoles, but there are plenty of bright spots for the console that leads the latest generation.
"Meanwhile, PlayStation 4 has shown an ability to capture both previous PlayStation 3 owners, as well as competitive seventh gen users, thanks to its superior resolution, Blu-ray player and game library according to purchasers," said Nielsen.
