This weekend, Sony’s PlayStation Network was down for more than 24 hours, one of the longest unscheduled outages for a major gaming network in recent history. Many of PlayStation’s online services were down Friday and Saturday, interrupting many weekends and stoking some sensible fear about the future of digital game ownership.
The network outage previews a troubling future for ownership of games, as the industry’s reliance on network connections and digital copies reared its ugly head in the face of the downtime. (And even more troubling, the outage even impacted some people’s ability to play their physical games.) But I wanted to share my own personal experience with the outage, too.
Gearing up for the Super Bowl, I’ve been in a sports gaming mood of late. I’ve been playing a lot of the hockey roguelite Tape to Tape on my PC, and that experience encouraged me to dive even deeper into sports simulation land with the AAA titles I have on PlayStation 5. So I booted up TopSpin 2K25, the latest in 2K Sports’ tennis franchise. I wanted a single-player sports title that would allow me to explore the narratives I love in sports games without the complications of having to keep track of a bunch of players at once.
That’s when I discovered the PlayStation Network was down, because almost every single game mode in TopSpin 2K25 was unavailable. What was most shocking about this is that most of them were single-player modes. With a PSN outage, I would have expected not to be able to play with or against other people online. But even the single-player career mode file I’ve been playing for months, which involves no one but me, was grayed out on the menu screen. Without a connection to the PlayStation Network, the game was essentially unplayable; the only modes I could play were tutorial or exhibition.
So I switched gears and decided to boot up NBA 2K25 for the first time. Somehow, I was able to install a patch for the game, despite the network being down, and luckily, the single-player modes in that title worked. So I began a long-running challenge of mine: Start a franchise mode with an expansion team, and see how far I can get with a bunch of the league’s cast-offs. But because I wasn’t connected to the network, the game didn’t kick me into the tutorial first. Although I’ve played NBA 2K for many, many years, I was surprised to find that the developers had completely changed the shooting system in NBA 2K25 — something the tutorial would’ve told me right off. I missed every shot in my first game before simming the rest in frustration, and ended up starting over with a new file the following day.
Closing out my day with the PSN outage, I switched gears to Dishonored, a game from my backlog that my brother and I both decided to play for the first time this month. That game has no real online features to speak of, which meant it was pretty immune from the outage, except… I generally play my PS5 on my PC, using the PS Remote Play app, because I like to keep the TV open for my partner to play their own games or watch things. At first, I was able to use Remote Play during the outage, but after my first Dishonored session Saturday, the app logged me out of my Sony account. Because of the outage, I couldn’t log back in, meaning I could no longer play my PS5 via my PC.
At this point, I called it a day on trying to play a PS5 game on Saturday, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone. I didn’t even have to deal with the bigger issues — like the ones people had with physical games, or people scheduling gaming time with friends only to find that was impossible. For me, it was a minor, if quite irritating, inconvenience, but it still surprised me to see how many of my games became unplayable without an online connection. It’s a worrying preview as to what could be a very difficult future for gaming preservation and ownership.
The post The PlayStation outage was a reminder of how few games I actually own appeared first on Polygon.
