Friday night, PlayStation Network went down for PS4 and PS5 users, impacting just about every facet of PSN from account management to gaming to social to PlayStation Video and more. For gamers, it’s been a rough ride, not being able to access and play single-player games on consoles for some while others, while they may be able to access certain games, find them not working especially well (which appears to be the case for some Fortnite players). But for someone like me, who has been considering rejoining the gaming world and purchasing a PS5, while the outage isn’t directly impacting me it is making me seriously rethink the purchase of a new console and the reason why comes down to this: the lack of transparency from PlayStation and Sony about what’s going on.
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Nearly 24-hours into the PlayStation Network outage and it’s been crickets from PlayStation. The last — and thus far only — communication from PlayStation about the issue came at 7:46 p.m. CT Friday night and said a whole lot of what users already knew at that time: “We are aware some users might currently be experiencing issues with PSN.” The communication, shared on the official Ask PlayStation X account, also directed users to a status website which is as equally devoid of real information as the post. Instead of anything official or substantive from PlayStation, users are instead getting their information from different games and even word of mouth with nothing very official and much of it conflicting on top of that.
This lack of information is really not something you want to see when considering making a pretty major purchase on a game system, and while I’m a PlayStation person the silence is really troubling for me. I’ve been a PlayStation person for pretty much forever. When the first one debuted, I camped outside our local retailer to get my hands on one. Several years later, I did the same, skipping a few important college classes to be the first in line to get a PlayStation 2. But around the time of the PS3, adult life got in the way and it’s only been recently that I’ve started making my way back with my heart set on a PS5 so that I can join my friends playing things like Marvel Rivals and Fortnite and whatever else catches my eye. But a PS5 is an investment — anything gaming really is — and while the current outage thus far isn’t anything quite like the 2011 hack, the fact that Sony hasn’t said anything really doesn’t make me feel good about spending my money like that.
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I don’t think it’s asking that much that PlayStation offer users some sort of update about what’s going on. It doesn’t even have to be something elaborate or even all that detailed. At this point, just an acknowledgement that this outage has been going on for nearly 24 hours would be appreciated, maybe even some additional information about what they’re doing to try to address the issue, what they have found is working, what they know is still down, things like that. When something breaks, even if all the answers aren’t available just yet, communication of any sort is key. It’s when people are left in the dark and have to rely on rumor that you start to get frustration and mistrust. This only gets worse the longer a situation continues and is exacerbated when those impacted — in this case, Fortnite and Marvel Rivals specifically — make their own statements trying to answer as many questions as possible just to counter the silence. Why hasn’t PlayStation said something, anything about the outage? It just doesn’t make sense. It breaks trust.
And it doesn’t really make me want to allocate my hard-earned money on a new gaming system when the company isn’t even willing to offer up so much as a “stuff’s still broke, we’re working on it.” At the end of the day, playing video games isn’t life or death. It’s a fun hobby and a great way to unwind or spend time with friends Some people look forward to their weekend gaming all week long, a little escape after a stressful week. But when that escape is itself causing stress and the company we pay and expect to offer us a working product fails without acknowledgement, it’s just not fun anymore. Sure, PlayStation Network will come back up, eventually. We’ll all move on and the games will begin again, but as for me standing out here with dollars to spend, the silence is telling me that maybe it’s time to just head over to Xbox.
Keep checking with ComicBook for coverage of the PlayStation Network outage and be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments!
