Late on Friday, the PlayStation Network service went down for an entire day, with very little communication from Sony. They mentioned the outage once during its entire run, with an almost hilariously understated description of “some users might be currently experiencing issues” to describe the outage of the entire network for every PlayStation gamer on PS5 or PS4 on the planet.
The outage prevented all PlayStation users from gaming with their friends or strangers during the downtime, as well as stopping PlayStation Store purchases, some game downloads and even reportedly the ability to pair a disk drive with the PS5 Digital Edition. It was a big mess, and it left pretty much every PlayStation player unhappy, but it wasn’t just Sony that got hurt by the outage.
Sure, before we go any further it’s worth acknowledging that Sony is the primary recipient of the negative impacts the outage had. They were forced into giving players compensation in the form of five additional days added to all PlayStation Plus subscription plans, they lost out on potential revenue while the PlayStation Store was down, and at a time when the broader view of Sony’s approach to gaming isn’t the best, it’s just plain bad optics. They’re of course going to suffer at least a casual shift in opinion from the gaming masses, but in the current era of gaming we live in, it’s interesting to note the financial harm goes beyond just the platform holder during a network outage.
The current era of gaming is of course the live service era, with always-online multiplayer titles being one of the most dominant forces in the world of gaming at present. From culture landmarks such as Fortnite and Call of Duty to new phenomena like Marvel Rivals or Helldivers 2, the gaming industry has never been more online. As PlayStation Network operates as a bridge between PlayStation users (the biggest console market for online games), and the digital space of the games they seek to play, when PSN fails it harms both sides of the bridge.
During the PSN outage, the player count of Fortnite took a severe hit compared to its usual expected numbers, creating a weird bumpy period on the player count graph as all other platform users were online, but the PlayStation ones were missing. We can assume the same happened with hot new game Marvel Rivals, after the developer Netease confirmed via a post on X (formerly Twitter) that they were in active communication with PlayStation and were waiting on their solution plan while services were offline.
Live service games are entirely reliant on an active player base to keep up their business. The reason these games are literally free to “purchase” and play is because the microtransactions within them are designed to entice and encourage consumer spending. When an entire market of gamers are prevented from accessing a live service title on their platform of choice, not only do the players miss out on precious game time, the developers of that game miss out on potential spending.
It’s not even just spending of cash on microtransactions that live service titles depend on; it’s engagement. Financial engagement is just one form of payment made towards live service games, but the second most important is player time and attention. With more players online, you’ve got more people hyping up your game, bigger player numbers to boast about, a bigger sign to advertise your game to more people – and ultimately more potential customers. As such, an outage on PlayStation Network isn’t just an outage of players being able to play the live service game they want to play, it’s also an outage of engagement on those live service titles who rely on those gamers – and engagement is the lifeblood of a live service.
Even so, despite my focus here on live service games like Fortnite or Marvel Rivals, even non-online focused games can experience a loss of engagement and potential financial harm in the wake of a network outage, purely because the era of gaming we live in even outside of live services is so digital-centric. Take for example Monster Hunter Wilds, the latest, much-hyped mainline game in the hunting of monsters franchise. The good folks over at Capcom released a second open beta onto PS5, to test their network services and to allow players to get a feel for the latest entry Monster Hunter has to offer, but PlayStation Network went down just a day after the beta started.
Monster Hunter Wilds is not a live service game and nor is it even online required, but it utilized the dominance of the Internet to allow players to log in and try the game out with network features, a key test for both players and the development team, but it was hit so hard by the outage they had to announce the consideration of an extension to the open beta by another 24 hours in a future date. These are potential customers that were going to try out the beta (which even links to the PlayStation Store to try and entice purchases), but were prevented from getting their foot in the door by PlayStation Network’s outage.
The outage that was suffered by PlayStation Network was hardly the worst it could have been – after all, the service did once infamously go down for a little over three entire weeks once back in 2011. However, it still marks an interesting warning to the gaming industry regarding the future, that not only do network services like PlayStation Network harm themselves when they fail, they also harm all the developers on the other side who are relying on the online traffic for their engagement, profits or just simple hype building. We don’t know when and if it will happen again, but the potential of the all-digital future should be heeded by the warnings we see now as we approach it.
Were your gaming plans affected by the PlayStation Network outage? What are your thoughts on the digital-focused future of gaming? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! For more breaking gaming news, or opinion pieces like this one, be sure to keep your eyes on GameLuster.
