Oh Angry Internet Man. A legion-chorus of ill-educated voices waxing reactionary about the ills of the world via the comment thread. And with the PSN Outage, A.I.M has been more prevalent than the Easter Bunny this weekend.
The basics of the story – PSN goes down; Anonymous suspected; PSN still down many days later; Sony release statement explicitly containing no expected date of return to service; oh and Portal 2 was just released; SKYNET to blame? And so on.
There’s a sliding scale of reactions. If you didn’t own a PS3, you probably didn’t notice until recently, as the farce-o-meter ticked over into the red. If you didn’t play online, again you probably didn’t notice beyond the recurring error box atop your homescreen. If you play online regularly, you were probably pissed. If you had a Playstation Plus membership (*author sighs inwardly*) you probably even felt a little ripped off.
I took the time to survey the comment threads across various outlets relevant to the outage, hunting for beerspit night and cursing to illuminate what the world thinks of SCE right now.
Append (sic) where necessary.
-
From the Sony “no updates” update post…
“Awesome. Keep up the good work. We are grateful for your efforts.” – GameLordGX
“keep on updating us that’s all we your dedicated fans ask for.” MaxPayneV3
“Thanks for the update, but I believe what everyone wants to know is whether credit card info and the money already in our accounts was compromised at any point.” – Santesdai
“Boy I sure am glad I paid $50 for a membership I cant use, and pay $15 a month for a game I cant play. I was fine with a day or two, but we are hitting on day 5.” – NecroC
“How about a work around to let me link my steam account to my PSN one so i can play my PC version of portal in co-op!??!?!?” apoc_reg
–
From various outage related threads on Kotaku…
“I lost a week of my DCUO subscription thanks to this. Knowing Sony they won’t refund it either.
I won’t be renewing.” – Levyiur
“In the end, this ends up being the ultimate argument against the cloud as the sole means of storage.” – MyPonyRocks
“Just because we dont pay for PSN doesnt mean we should just shrug this off. We bought a PS3 expecting to be able to play games over PSN. When the service doesnt work for days, it’s kind of a problem.” – Saint In
“I think subscribers should have free time added to their account based on the length of the downtime.
I don’t think anyone else is entitled to direct compensation however Sony definitely needs to change some things in their system.
They owe it to their users to fix the vulnerability and make sure it cannot be exploited again. They owe it to their customers to change their products and allow for purchased games to be played offline (minus multiplayer modes/content for obvious reasons).
This seems like a text book example on how DRM seems to be more an inconvenience to the customers than the pirates. I’m making an assumption of course however I think that games with single player content should be able to operate without an active internet connection.” - Teran
–
From Eurogamer comment threads…
“Brink is out in two weeks! If it’s not fixed by then, there’ll be hell to pay. 
“ – DozyKipper
“Only thing that’s bugging me is that I bought Portal 2 on the PS3 simply so I could activate it on my PC for free while still being able to enjoy split-screen with my girlfriend at some point in the future. Very frustrating that I can’t play it on the PC – really don’t want to play single player on the PS3.
I should add that as a fairly responsible 38 year old male, I really do think the way Sony is treating its customers here is beyond the pale. I shudder to think what would happen if I treated my customer in this way.” – nobloodyname
“I like the word outage. Sounds like something that might be whispered in a debutante ball” – jellyBelly (I just really liked this one)
–
Here’s some brief analysis as a side-dish for your comments.
The selection above was chosen on the basis of clarity of message, rather than to further any particular bias or opinion I have on the matter. The selection leans towards the negative because there are a variety of reasons that people are pissed that want airing. But over the endless pages of opinion, trends are more difficult to notice.
People are irritated, and worried. There are fears about credit card details escaping. There are fears about how long this is going to take. There are fears about the money being lost by those with subscribed services. There is irritation about how this happened as Portal 2 was launched, which is really just unfortunate for Sony. There is irritation that the only comment from Sony is No Comment, even though that’s maybe not something Sony can be blamed for.
The fallout from this will be interesting to watch. The difference between PSN going down and the WoW servers going down is that it is, of course, a platform rather than an individual game. This happens to be one of the risks that goes along with the structure of console online gaming (verses the dedicated servers of the PC that is).
There’s the question of being owed something for all of this. Personally, I don’t think this extends beyond extensions of service for DCU, Playstation+, etc. But don’t listen to me necessarily, I’m just a boy, standing in front of a Japanese electronics giant, asking him to let me play Super Street Fighter IV with twenty-fingers savants around the world.
Add your own comments to the discussion below.
–
Sources
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/25/psn-update/
http://uk.kotaku.com/5795650/sony-must-help-out-devs-affected-by-psn-downtime
http://uk.kotaku.com/5795474/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-playstation-network-outage
http://uk.kotaku.com/5795055/does-sony-owe-you-anything-for-the-psn-outage
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-26-psn-outage-woe-enters-seventh-day
