PlayStation Fans Just Saw Firsthand The Biggest Problem With Digital Games
The price of convenience.
Play any good games this weekend? For a lot of players on PlayStation, the answer is an emphatic “no,” thanks to a nearly 24-hour PlayStation Network outage that left even single-player games inaccessible for half the weekend. Sony offered compensation for PSN subscribers affected by the outage, but some players are saying it’s not enough, and the outage stands as a reminder of how precarious ownership of digital games actually is.
PSN — the network that powers all of PlayStation’s online functions — first started failing around 6 p.m. Eastern on Friday, February 7. A rapidly growing number of players reported being unable to see friends lists and other online activity, but to make matters worse, even single-player games couldn’t be started. That’s because in addition to online play, PSN servers validate PlayStation games, making sure you actually have the license to play the games already on your system. The same issue prevented players from pairing new external disk drives with their consoles, but physical games that had already been installed and validated still functioned. The problem was mostly fixed by Saturday evening, with most players able to access the network again about 24 hours after it first went down.
It’s not just online games that were affected by the PSN outage.
As compensation for the downtime, Sony is offering five days of PS Plus to current subscribers, a deal that has gotten a largely negative response from players. Some are saying that five days isn’t enough, but the larger issue is that it only applies to current PS Plus subscribers, when the outage affected everyone on PlayStation, not just subscribers.
To make matters worse, Sony spent the entire day’s outage not communicating with players about what was going on, and even after the fact, it isn’t saying what caused the problem. All that Sony has officially revealed is that PSN suffered “an operational issue.” Given that an infamous weeks-long PSN outage in 2011 was the result of the servers being compromised and players’ personal information — including home addresses and credit card numbers — being revealed, it’s no wonder that people are demanding more information this time around.
Aside from dissatisfaction with Sony’s response, the outage also highlights the consequences of the current state of gaming relying so heavily on digital purchases. According to GamesIndustry.biz, digital sales made up 95 percent of gaming revenue in 2024. It’s a slightly smaller 84 percent for consoles, but that still means the vast majority of the PlayStation audience is foregoing physical games. It’s no mystery why that’s the case. Booting up your console and buying games directly from PSN — or any other digital storefront — is quicker and easier than heading to a store to buy games or even having them shipped to you, and they often run promotions that make digital games cheaper to purchase than their physical counterparts. The digital approach also means you don’t have to worry about losing or damaging a game.
Digital downloads are the most convenient way to get games for most players, but they have downsides compared to physical games.
But the downsides to digital became much more obvious over the weekend. If you buy a physical game, you can play it as long as you have a console to read the disc. It might seem like the same would be true for digital games, but that’s not quite true. In actuality, when you buy a digital game, you’re just buying a license to access it. That license can be revoked, but that’s not the only way to lose access. As some PlayStation fans may have recently learned, the default for digital games is to communicate with a server each time they’re started in order to check that the license is valid for the console they’re being played on. If there’s an error anywhere along the way that prevents that check from happening, the game you may have thought you owned will be unplayable.
It’s a clear problem without an easy answer. While this weekend the issue was with PSN, it’s entirely possible that the online services that power Xbox or Steam could have the same kind of service interruption. And while adopting a physical-only policy might be smart, there are plenty of barriers to keep players from going that route. While ditching digital entirely might not be feasible for everyone, the PSN outage is a dramatic reminder that the most convenient part of modern gaming carries its own dangers.
