Unlike many of you, I didn’t realise that PlayStation Network was down for nearly a full day this weekend, because I was touching grass. On Saturday morning Singapore time, a friend complained to me that he hadn’t been able to play Marvel Rivals on his PS5 because of a PSN outage – on Sunday morning, I checked back in and learned that it had been a global outage that lasted close to 24 hours.
Obviously, a PSN outage would lock players out of their online-only games, which I’m sure ruined a lot of people’s weekend plans, because none of you are touching enough grass. But what was more surprising was that a lot of offline titles locked people out too, because owning a game isn’t enough to play it anymore – your console needs the internet to confirm that you have a licence to play it, too.
This might have been another opportunity for physical media sickos to gloat (don’t yell at me, I’d be one of you if I had the space to store all those boxes, but I have housemates), except that if you own a disc-less PS5 and hadn’t yet paired it to a disc drive, you wouldn’t be able to do that without the PSN servers either. Basically, the PSN outage screwed players everywhere, even when there was no real reason for it to do so. Why would you need PSN to pair a disc drive?
We Need To Get Things Offline Again
There are a lot of obvious reasons to be annoyed that all the media we consume, including video games, is online now. Digital media can disappear without a trace and become completely inaccessible unless you own it on physical media. Westworld is gone from HBO. You can’t watch Twin Peaks: The Return anywhere. Streaming-exclusive shows without physical releases, like Disney’s Willow, basically cease to exist once they’re pulled from those platforms.
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We’re seeing the same with games. Lots of games never get physical releases or only exist physically on older hardware, meaning getting pulled from storefronts makes them basically disappear, like when Nintendo’s eShop shut down. The ones that do get physical releases may not even contain the full game – Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s physical edition still required a download, making it essentially a digital edition with a free piece of plastic.
Even if you do manage to get a physical copy of a game that actually has the whole game on CD, you’ll likely still need an internet connection (and for your console’s servers to be working) to download a day one patch that fixes most of its biggest problems and gives you the most complete, polished version of a game on launch, because you’re almost never able to play a game straight off the disc these days.
But PlayStation Is Guiltier Than Anyone Else
Okay, yes, we all know physical media is important and that now, more than ever, it’s being devalued by companies that benefit most from digital-only releases. But then you also have to take into account that Sony has been pushing PlayStation Network sign-in requirements outside of its consoles as well.
As part of Sony’s push to launch its first-party, console-exclusive games on PC, we’ve seen it attempt to force PC players to register for PlayStation Network accounts and be logged in to play, though there isn’t any real reason for it to require this. There’s some justification for this when it comes to multiplayer games like Helldivers 2 and the ill-fated Concord, in that it enables better chat moderation, but it’s also been required for God of War Ragnarok and the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster. If we’re being honest, Sony was just collecting user data.
Sony has since walked this decision back after those games were review-bombed for the requirement, instead making it so that players who link its PC ports to PSN accounts get rewards. If it had decided to stick to this wildly unpopular policy, it’s likely that Helldivers 2 would have been unplayable on PC as well as on console this past weekend.
The single-player games would likely have been playable, but only if you’d already logged in to PSN on your PC.
It’s easy for consumers to close their eyes to the implications of a perpetually online media ecosystem when things are working as intended, but the PSN outage is just another reminder that all tech is fallible. This time, it’s just a minor inconvenience, but lest we forget, 2011’s PSN outage lasted 23 days and exposed the personal data of tens of millions of users, including peoples’ addresses, dates of birth, and credit card information.
The more we unnecessarily link our games to servers and online services, the more control we give up to corporations who can take those things away from us at any moment. We already don’t own the digital games we’ve paid for, and it’s only getting worse.
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