Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony charges a subscription fee for any and all network multiplayer traffic.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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And 99% of the games I “own”. So much for a relaxing Saturday playing games. Fuck you Sony.
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Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?
Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially on console.
Sure, but if it were free it's a "you get what you pay for" situation. People are a lot more forgiving when they aren't personally losing money.
You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur's Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.
Then beyond that, you've got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don't even connect to Sony's servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty's multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony's dime. And beyond that...the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that's accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee compared to free online on PC is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are leaving consoles for PC.
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Nobody's gonna dispute the necessity of some sort of server somewhere in the mix. But does it need to be something like PSN? A central 3rd party service that most games only use because they're forced to?
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Free your mind! There is another way. Video game servers should be open-source, and the games should permit you to choose a custom server. This way, games can survive the bankruptcy of their creators' companies.
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Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony backed off charging a subscription fee for single player PC games
Or should I say, BOY
To be clear, that was not a thing. Just the PSN account doesn't require payment. The subscription is for playing in MP and (I think) access to online media like yt.
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Unless the game has its own subscription, like Final Fantasy XIV.
Unless that has changed over the years. I'm not sure.
It’s 2011 all over again
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outage
Last night I thought "this happened a few years ago, too, and we got free games as an apology" and now you tell me it was 14 YEARS ago!?
Yes, and I'm also telling you we'll get no free games this time. Business is more of a "fuck you" attitude in 2025.
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Your making me feel old... I remember when it happened. I was so pissed I couldn't play call of duty.
You're making ME feel old. I remember having to go over my friend's house to play multiplayer.
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I remember being so happy that outage happened because they gave away free games. That's how I got to play LittleBigPlanet for the first time.
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Sony’s uptime delusions crumbling faster than a PSN auth server. Fourteen hours of radio silence while charging for the privilege of digital serfdom? Masterstroke. Remember 2011’s month-long outage? At least we got free games as consolation—now they’ll just send thoughts and prayers via shareholder memos.
”Premium service” my ass. Paywalls for multiplayer, cloud saves held hostage, and a walled garden rotting from neglect. But hey, keep funding Zuck’s yacht repairs while your PS5 gathers dust. The 2011 apology tour is dead—2025’s mantra is ”fuck you, pay more.”
Reboot the servers, Jim. Or just admit the cloud was a screensaver all along.
The cloud is just someone else's computer.
You just made a Techbro angry somewhere in the world.
Nope, people in IT know that the cloud is just someone else's computer lol
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If only there were a way to connect to a network without an intermediary like PSN. Damn shame that it's impossible.
I think ARPANET will have something like this once they got it working
This doesn't bode well.
The last time this happened was when Anonymous hacked PSN and took them down for a month after they went after Geohotz(cant remember the spelling) for jailbreaking/reverse engineering the ps3.
Radio silence like before as well. I hope they weren't breached again.
Oh yeah, I remember that now!
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I've never thought about it before, but I wonder if the companies with games containing microtransactions can ask PSN for compensation for lost income due to long outages.
I knew a guy who did this with Comcast for every minute his Internet was out. He'd call them every day for weeks until they cut him an account credit
When I worked at a web host, we had people like that. Being support sucked. Like, yes, it sucks that your e-commerce site that uses horrifically outdated software is offline but, we don't offer quad nines, especially not on a $35/year shared hosting plan. And, honestly Drew, your site gets single-digit visits per month and sells erotica based upon the premise of Edgar Allen Poe being transported to 1990s Brooklyn and working as an apartment building super. At best, you're breaking even on that hosting bill.
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Musk is currently reviewing it for DEI terms. Also Trump just fired the Sony board and declared himself president of Sony.
What?
That's your body suffering from whiplash as we're once again back in the era where you never know whether someone is telling the truth or not when they make a wild claim about the president like that.
a play on Trump purging the Kennedy Center and installing himself as chief
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As of about an hour ago, it is back up
Damn reading the impact this has is some combination of hilarious and horrifying to see people bought into a service like this. If it was free or simply a monthly sub like Netflix I could kinda understand. But a sub to use things you also had to buy? Fuck that.
Not sure if this is still the case, but with Steam it used to be that if you didn't put the client into "offline mode" ahead of time the client wouldn't open, let alone allow you to launch a game once the connection was lost.
I hope they took care of that by now.
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Finally picked up kingdom come 2 on my ps5 just to dust it off after not playing for years and this is my weekend. Well played Sony, well played
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Bungie devs who were desperately hoping for a good Heresy dungeon launch: ...I'm getting fired aren't I
I’ve been playing so much kingdom come deliverance 2 that I didn’t even notice PSN being down.
If you like RPGs try it.
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It annoys me that you can't even look at your trophies for games when PSN is down...
"Did you remember to plug the server back in after vacuuming the server room?"
"Shit." "Honey, gotta make a quick jump at the office! "
Better than every year or so no one can play the games they supposedly "bought" due to some technical hiccup for a random yet lengthy amount of time than some percentage of people be able to more easily play our games without paying us. -some Sony/gaming industry stooge probably
In all seriousness, people need to stop being so willing to put up with this sort of easily foreseeable failing with the current way of doing digital goods. If I can't use it without the blessing of someone else it is not buying, it is borrowing, and that severely impacts the value proposition for me personally.
Technical issues WILL happen. It is the nature of the beast, it is just terrible engineering to build what is essentially dead man switches into your customers products.
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