For a huge chunk of gamers, the majority of Saturday was spent wondering when the PlayStation Network (PSN) was going to be working again, and checking periodically to see if the problem had been fixed. Sony had near radio silence as to the problem, and PlayStation fans were left in the dark, and fearing it would a repeat of 2011’s disastrous 23 day long absence without service. Thankfully, it wasn’t anywhere near that bad, but Steam would have been hoping it continued for a while.
PSN Problems, Steam Benefits
While PSN is back up and working now, functioning normally as if nothing had ever happened, we still don’t know the exact cause of the issue. Whether it was merely a bad case of downtime or something more nefarious is to be established, but for now we can all be thankful that we at least can access and play our games now, with what’s left of the weekend.
On a week full of big releases like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Civilization 7, many sat down Friday night ready to boot up and relax, but were met with a disastrous error message that lasted almost 24 hours, until well into Saturday. For some fortunate souls, they played games that’d allow them to play, others suffered the long wait, and then there was a huge chunk of PSN users that clearly also have Steam accounts, as the numbers prove a massive influx of players not recently seen on the service – found using SteamDB.
Nowadays, Steam always has millions logged on, playing one game or another, but as the screenshots below show, the PSN outage seemingly helped benefit the PC Launcher a great deal. Of course, not the entire additional two+million will be down to the lack of PlayStation capabilities, but it definitely played a part.
There’s also the argument that a portion of those extra two million would have been partly down to the big releases already mentioned above, but again, it’s just as likely, if not more so, that a lot of them are PlayStation fans with Steam platforms that needed their gaming fix.
Either way, what this outage has highlighted once again is the desperate need for a middle ground to be found to the poorly thought out ‘always online’ feature that developers and platform designers seem so desperate to keep hold of, as at the first sign of trouble, it’s us gamers that really suffer.
For more Thumb Wars Gaming coverage, check out how Sony may have made the first steps to Bloodborne 2, or this handy explainer of the incredibly complicated The Last of Us timeline.
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Luke Addison is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Thumb Wars. Having previously been a part of multiple outlets over the years, including building an entire gaming team from nothing to something, he thought it best to forge his own path and answer only to himself. As likely to be found playing the latest game as he is in the kitchen relaxing (by cooking), he always brings the same bold and brash attitude to everything he does, with a heavy leaning on sarcasm and dry wit!
