Over the weekend, PlayStation Network – the backbone of PS5 and PS4’s online services – went down for roughly 24 hours. If we’re talking video game service outages in recent memory, it doesn’t get much longer than that. You’d think that Sony would want to provide some sort of explanation for such an unprecedented halt to basic functionality. But you’d be wrong.
After enduring a day of confused clamor across social media and Reddit, Sony published a brief statement to Twitter on Saturday, gifting PS Plus members an additional five days of service and saying that PSN had “fully recovered from an operational issue.” What kind of operational issue? Did it come from inside the house, or were hackers to blame – like during the 2011 PSN outage, so noteworthy that it has its own Wikipedia entry? Unclear! But it’s over now, so who cares. It’s yesterday’s news. Move on.
Never mind that as a result of the outage, some people lost access not just to multiplayer games, but singleplayer games and features – a stark reminder of the fact that we don’t own our games anymore, even as price tags grow and developer headcounts shrink. This also puts into perspective Sony’s insistence on shoehorning PSN requirements into PC ports like Helldivers 2 and God of War: Ragnarok, which PC players openly rebelled against for the better part of a year until Sony finally relented just a couple weeks ago with the PC release of Spider-Man 2.
In that case, too, Sony repeatedly failed to provide a compelling explanation for its actions. In May 2024, Helldivers 2 was briefly removed from sale on Steam in 177 countries due to the PSN requirement, and yet, the best Sony could offer at the time was a claim that PSN was necessary to “protect players from griefing and abuse by enabling the banning of players that engage in that type of behaviour,” something plenty of non-PSN games have proven perfectly capable of doing. Sony’s main objective is clearly to corral PC players into PSN’s ecosystem and monopolize their attention, but it refuses to just come out and say that. So now that requirements have failed, it’s dressing up its desire with in-game incentives like early unlocks of cosmetics that can already be obtained via other means.
Just like the PSN requirement, this new incentive-based approach feels almost insultingly low effort. Why should anybody make an account for a service with an ulterior motive that offers little benefit when the best Sony can do in the face of a worrying wobble is act like it’s all business as usual? Why would anyone want to be assimilated into that ecosystem if they can avoid it?
Nothing needs to work this way. Nobody benefits from not being able to access single-player games and features when servers go down. There is no upside to logging into multiple game services at once that outweighs the downsides. And being left in the dark about all of it – even if the underlying cause of major issues was relatively mundane – just leads to speculation and catastrophizing. It erodes trust.
But, contrary to the meaning of the term, services created by companies like Sony no longer seek to serve users; they are first and foremost means of control, extensions of the attention economy. When viewed through that lens, Sony’s actions here make sense. Control is a one-way street, not a relationship. You’ll take what you’re given, and you’ll like it. You’ll enjoy your five additional days of service, and you will not think beyond them.
