In an effort to woo customers after a 26 day outage, Sony’s PSN is offering a “Welcome Back” program with the promise of free games. Basically, this welcome back is a “we’re sorry” package.

The compensation for not only dealing with the almost month-long outage but also having personal data compromised is an offering of two out of a choice of five games.

Nick Caplin, head of communications at SCEE, unveiled the rewards on the Sony blog.

“Now that certain PSN services have been restored and you're once again enjoying online gaming, it seems a good time to confirm what is being offered as part of the Welcome Back program,” he said.

“All existing PlayStation Network members will be able to access the following from PlayStation Store: Two PS3 games from the following list: LittleBigPlanet, InFamous, Wipeout HD/Fury, Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty and Dead Nation,” he continued.

PSP users get two games from another list: LittleBigPlanet for PSP, Modnation Racers, Pursuit Force and Killzone Liberation. Everyone gets a free weekend of selected movies, 30 days of PlayStation Plus - 60 if you're already a subscriber - and 100 free items in PlayStation Home. Music Unlimited users get 30 free days.

InFamous and LittleBigPlanet are both popular PlayStation 3 exclusives, which means a lot of PS3 owners likely own one or both. Wipeout HD was one of the original, high-profile offerings in PlayStation Plus, Sony's VIP membership that includes free games and other perks. Avid PlayStation fans might be stuck with choosing from games they already own, and therein lies the problem, that this package is hardly a consolation prize for the woes of the customer.

The electronics giant was recently met with criticism from PSN users due to the fact many gamers already owned most of, if not all games up for grabs.

Caplin defended the titles on offer.

“We've tried really hard to put together a list of high quality BD games, rather than simply offering cheaper PSN titles,” he said. “The average metacritic rating for these games is over 84 per cent, so these are high quality games.”

Users who already own the games or are not interested in the titles available won’t be able to swap them for something different.

“Unfortunately with a user base of 77 million people, it is really hard to offer something for everyone,” explained Caplin.

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