PSN is back with a free gift for players – but only some will receive it, leaving many affected gamers without anything to show for their frustrating weekend of downtime. PlayStation Network (PSN) has a pretty important job: to offer some free games from time to time with its PS Plus service and allow players to use online services for their games. This weekend, it didn’t exactly live up to its promises.
On Saturday, February 8, PSN went down, and stayed down, for just under 24 hours, meaning players couldn't access the PlayStation Store, or even play games that require an online connection, including the pride of PlayStation’s roster like Black Ops 6, Fortnite, and Marvel Rivals. It’s a brutal loss for Sony that it has only itself to blame for. With many, many games suffering a potentially major hit to their player bases and, by extension, revenue, all the company managed to offer during the downtime on Twitter was, “We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN.” Not that helpful, really. Luckily, though, Sony is coming through with a means of patching things up by offering affected players a PSN downtime compensation. But it isn’t for everyone.
Taking to Twitter, Sony, via the @AskPlayStation Twitter account, has announced its plan to offer PSN downtime compensation, saying, “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience. All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional five days of service.”. On the surface, this PSN downtime compensation seems fair – after all, most players are accessing their online services via PS Plus, which is largely what the service exists for. Even though this was the second longest downtime in PSN's history, it was still only 24 hours compared to five days offered in return. However, this doesn’t mean something to everyone, as some free-to-play games like Fortnite, Valorant, and Genshin Impact can be played without a subscription service. Thus, some players who didn’t have an active PS Plus subscription were affected by the downtime.
It's surprising, too, that other gaming companies seem to be offering players a more thoughtful solution, with the EA FC 25 PS Plus compensation giving players a 48-hour extension on a number of objectives and in-game competitions that they may have missed out on in the downtime, as revealed on Twitter. It seems that PlayStation has identified what it has a lot of to spare (a practically infinite number of days of subscription to PS Plus) and dished it out to the easiest players for them to reach, leaving some out in the cold in the process.
It’s a pretty embarrassing lack of foresight from PlayStation, especially as downtime rewards in the past have been great, with the PS3 era offering a free download of InFamous, which felt incredibly generous. With players having Battle Passes and quests to complete, especially as Destiny 2 launches into a new era, this outage has robbed players of some crucial playtime and has failed to deliver fair PSN downtime compensation to many. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
