Once upon a time in the Playstation 3 era it was acceptable for the Playstation Network to go offline as Playstation gamers did not have to pay $50/£40 a year to play online. Since the introduction of the PS4 and PS Plus being mandatory for online play Sony has come under more and more scrutiny for having a poor online infrastructure which breaks on a regular basic.
On Christmas day, the day where thousands of people were expecting to be able to unbox their PS4 and be able play some Fifa or Call Of Duty online, PSN was down for almost everyone. While servers are bound to take hits at some point it is a little ridiculous that PSN goes down as often as it does. Christmas day is not the only time when PSN has goes down, if you are a Playstation gamer like me than you will know that the service constantly undergoes maintenance in addition to hacker attacks. The hacks are arguably a bigger issue as important details such as credit card numbers and addresses are not truly safe.
Another major problem with PSN going down is that recent Triple-A games require updates and patches in order to actually work. Sony-owned titles such as LittleBigPlanet 3 and DRIVECLUB are an absolute mess without the day one patches installed, and even then they still struggle to work properly. There are also plenty of other third-party games which came out this fall which require updates to work; Assassin’s Creed: Unity, The Crew, Dragon Age: Inquisition and more.
Online multiplayer is not the only thing effected by PSN going down; trophy syncing, the Playstation Store, messaging and more is no longer an option for certain people living in certain areas of the globe. The fact is that the PS4 is not cheap, the box is expensive and PS Plus, while very good due to the Instant Games Collection, also costs money so it is annoying to see all of these expensive products no longer functioning as advertised.
Many other service providers such as cell providers will issue credit if their service goes down, Sony should start doing the same thing when the Playstation Network ceases to work. If PSN went down once or twice a year there would not be that much of a problem but since the network fails multiple times in the same month, every month, it is an issue. Even people who do not have PS Plus subscriptions are entitled to a better service than this.
Do you think that Sony should give an extra day of PS Plus to subscribers when the Playstation Network goes down? Tell us in the comments below.