The PlayStation Outage Highlighted How Little Games I Truly Own

Over the past weekend, gaming enthusiasts everywhere found themselves facing an unexpected hurdle as Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) experienced a prolonged outage, lasting over a day. It’s among the longest unscheduled downtimes a major gaming network has faced recently. The disruption affected many of PlayStation’s online services on both Friday and Saturday, leading to numerous interrupted weekends and sparking genuine concerns about the implications for digital game ownership moving forward.

This outage serves as a stark reminder of the challenges tied to game ownership in an increasingly digital landscape. Our dependence on network connections has been laid bare, as digital games, networks, and even physical game playability found themselves entangled in this web of problems. Having experienced this firsthand, I wanted to share how it affected my own gaming sessions.

Leading up to the Super Bowl, I’ve been bitten by the sports gaming bug. I’ve sunk countless hours into Tape to Tape on my PC—a hockey roguelite—and it reignited my passion for sports simulations. Armed with this enthusiasm, I fired up my trusty PlayStation 5, game set on diving into TopSpin 2K25, the latest installment from the 2K Sports tennis series. I was eager to indulge in a narrative-driven single-player experience, free from the complexity of managing multiple players.

However, that’s when I hit an unexpected roadblock: the PSN was down, rendering nearly every game mode in TopSpin 2K25 unavailable. It was quite the surprise to discover even single-player modes were off-limits. I understood online multiplayer might be out of bounds, but my solo career mode—my personal playground for months—was also inaccessible. Without a PSN connection, my options were whittled down to tutorial and exhibition modes.

Determined not to let my gaming day go to waste, I shifted gears to NBA 2K25. Miraculously, despite the network hiccup, I managed to install a patch for the game, and happily enough, its single-player modes were functional. I embarked on a familiar challenge: building a franchise from scratch with an expansion team. But due to the network issues, the game skipped the new tutorial. As a seasoned NBA 2K player, I was caught off-guard by changes in the shooting mechanics. A series of missed shots led to frustration, and I ultimately decided to start fresh the next day.

To round off my experiment with the PSN outage, I turned to Dishonored, a hidden gem in my backlog. Both my brother and I had decided to take it on for the first time this month. The beauty of Dishonored lies in its offline nature, largely unaffected by the outage. Yet, another hurdle emerged—I usually enjoy my PS5 experience via the PS Remote Play app on my PC, giving my partner the TV for their own gaming or viewing pleasures. Though I initially accessed Remote Play without a hitch, my subsequent Dishonored session on Saturday saw me being logged out from my Sony account. Thanks to the ongoing outage, I was unable to log back in, leaving my PS5 unplayable on my PC.

At that moment, I conceded defeat for the day—a scenario I’m certain many fellow gamers also faced. While I was spared some of the larger issues—like those attempting to play physical games or arrange gaming sessions with friends—the outage still struck me as an annoying inconvenience. It was startling to realize how many titles became unplayable offline. Such occurrences cast a concerning shadow on the future of game preservation and ownership in our digital age.