Sony’s PSN Server Outage ‘Compensation’ Just Adds Insult To Injury – Forbes
PS PlusSony’s PlayStation Network went down over the weekend. Servers were down for roughly 24 hours and PlayStation gamers were unable to play most of their games, including single-player titles that still require an online connection to work.This was made even more frustrating because several games were running free betas or 2XP weekends, meaning that PlayStation gamers were left out in the cold while their counterparts on Xbox and PC enjoyed their game time unabated. Worse, Sony remained weirdly silent during the outage, and has done little to explain what went wrong.When the issue was finally resolved, Sony explained what it was doing to make things right for its paying subscribers: An extra five days of PS Plus membership.This might seem, on its face, like a reasonable deal. You lose one day, you get five. That’s five times as good, right?Not really. For most PS Plus subscribers, this isn’t going to even count as anything for months or years. Let’s say Joe Gamer subscribes to PS Plus and three years from now decides that it is no longer something he uses enough to justify the cost. He cancels his plan, which would normally mean it ends on the last day of the billing cycle. But now, thanks to this outage, it will end five days later. Joe Gamer will likely not even realize this or remember that he has the extra five days.Second, what about all the people who don’t actually subscribe to PS Plus? You can still play free-to-play multiplayer games like Fortnite without a subscription, and of course you can play single-player games without a subscription. These gamers get nothing at all as recompense for the outage.There’s a case to be made that Sony could have just done nothing at all. Servers go down. It happens. Nobody is happy about it, but that’s the way of the world. In a sense, this would have been better. People would grumble, sure, but that’s how it goes. There are better ways to go about it, of course.Ideally, Sony would have A) been much more communicative during the outage, updating paying customers on social media regularly; and B) would have come up with a fun giveaway of some kind, like a free game for all PlayStation users, or a free theme even. Taking an unfortunate server incident and spinning it into good PR is an easy win for Sony. I reached out to Sony for more details but did not receive a response. “Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue,” the company posted to X/Twitter. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience.”Of course, some in the gaming community have taken this opportunity to castigate gamers as entitled and angry and silly because it’s just video games, people, chill out, as though consumers should be more complacent if the product is something they enjoy. And sure, everyone could be a bit more chill about things across the proverbial board, but it’s not hard to manage a small PR crisis like this and game journalists (or other gamers) wagging their fingers at the howling masses has rarely made anything better. Quite the contrary (see, for example, 2014).It’s all likely too little, too late, but I see this as part of a much larger trend on the PlayStation side of the fence where a lot of good will has been squandered. Sony continues to make unforced errors that could easily be avoided. The PlayStation account crisis that nearly sunk Helldivers 2, for instance. Sony recently announced that going forward, PlayStation games on PC would not require a PlayStation account but that signing up for one would come with extra bonuses. This is precisely how the company ought to have approached this from the outset.One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site’s Terms of Service. We’ve summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:So, how can you be a power user?Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service.
