Play any good games this weekend? For a lot of players on PlayStation, the answer is an emphatic “no,” thanks to a nearly 24-hour PlayStation Network outage that left even single-player games inaccessible for half the weekend. Sony offered compensation for PSN subscribers affected by the outage, but some players are saying it’s not enough, and the outage stands as a reminder of how precarious ownership of digital games actually is.
PSN — the network that powers all of PlayStation’s online functions — first started failing around 6 p.m. Eastern on Friday, February 7. A rapidly growing number of players reported being unable to see friends lists and other online activity, but to make matters worse, even single-player games couldn’t be started. That’s because in addition to online play, PSN servers validate PlayStation games, making sure you actually have the license to play the games already on your system. The same issue prevented players from pairing new external disk drives with their consoles, but physical games that had already been installed and validated still functioned. The problem was mostly fixed by Saturday evening, with most players able to access the network again about 24 hours after it first went down.
