{"id":1120087,"date":"2026-01-31T17:21:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T17:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.polygon.com\/?p=521519"},"modified":"2026-01-31T17:21:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T17:21:25","slug":"the-playstation-outage-was-a-reminder-of-how-few-games-i-actually-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/the-playstation-outage-was-a-reminder-of-how-few-games-i-actually-own\/","title":{"rendered":"The PlayStation outage was a reminder of how few games I actually own"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This weekend, Sony\u2019s PlayStation Network was down for more than 24 hours<\/a>, one of the longest unscheduled outages for a major gaming network in recent history. Many of PlayStation\u2019s online services were down Friday and Saturday, interrupting many weekends and stoking some sensible fear about the future of digital game ownership.<\/p>\n

The network outage previews a troubling future for ownership of games, as the industry\u2019s reliance on network connections and digital copies reared its ugly head in the face of the downtime. (And even more troubling, the outage even impacted some people\u2019s ability to play their physical games<\/a>). But I wanted to share my own personal experience with the outage, too.<\/p>\n

Gearing up for the Super Bowl<\/a>, I\u2019ve been in a sports gaming mood as of late. I\u2019ve been playing a lot of the hockey roguelite Tape to Tape <\/em>on my PC, and that experience encouraged me to dive even deeper into sports simulation land with the AAA titles I have on PS5. So I booted up TopSpin 2K25<\/em>, the latest in 2K\u2019s tennis franchise. I wanted a single-player sports title that would allow me to explore the narratives I love in sports games<\/a> without the complications of having to keep track of a bunch of players at once.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I discovered the PlayStation Network was down, because almost every single game mode in TopSpin 2K25<\/em> was unavailable. What was most shocking about this is most of those games were single-player modes. With a PSN outage, I would have expected not to be able to play with or against other people online. But even the single-player career mode file I\u2019ve been playing for months, which involves no one but me, was grayed out on the menu screen. Without a connection to the PlayStation Network, the game was essentially unplayable; the only game modes I could play were tutorial or exhibition.<\/p>\n

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So I switched gears and decided to boot up NBA 2K25 <\/em>for the first time. Somehow, I was able to install a patch for the game as well, despite the network being down, and luckily, the single-player modes in that title worked. So I started a long-running challenge of mine: Start a franchise mode with an expansion team, and see how far I can get with a bunch of the league\u2019s cast-offs. But because I wasn\u2019t connected to the network, the game didn\u2019t kick me into the tutorial first. Although I\u2019ve played the 2K series for many, many years, I was surprised to find the franchise has completely changed the shooting system in 2K25<\/em> \u2014 something the tutorial would\u2019ve told me right off. I missed every shot in my first game before simming the rest in frustration, and ended up starting over with a new file the following day.<\/p>\n

Closing out my day with the PSN outage, I switched gears to Dishonored<\/em>, a game from my backlog that my brother and I both decided to play for the first time this month. That game has no real online features to speak of, which meant it was pretty immune from the outage, except \u2026 <\/em>I generally play my PS5 on my PC, using the PS Remote Play app, because I like to keep the TV open for my partner to play their own games or watch things. At first, I was able to use Remote Play during the outage, but after my first Dishonored <\/em>session Saturday, the app logged me out of my Sony account. Because of the outage, I couldn\u2019t log back in, meaning I could no longer play the PS5 on my PC. <\/p>\n

At this point, I called it a day on trying to play a PS5 game on Saturday, and I\u2019m sure I wasn\u2019t alone. I didn\u2019t even have to deal with the bigger issues \u2014 like the ones people had with physical games, or people scheduling gaming time with friends only to find that was impossible. For me, it was a minor, if quite irritating, inconvenience, but it still surprised me to see how many of my games became unplayable without an online connection. It\u2019s a worrying preview as to what could be a very difficult future for gaming preservation and ownership.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend, Sony\u2019s PlayStation Network was down for more than 24 hours, one of the longest unscheduled outages for a major gaming network in recent history. Many of PlayStation\u2019s online services were down Friday and Saturday, interrupting many weekends and stoking some sensible fear about the future of digital game ownership. The network outage previews a troubling future for ownership of games, as the industry\u2019s reliance on network connections and digital copies reared its ugly head in the face of the downtime. (And even more troubling, the outage even impacted some people\u2019s ability to play their physical games). But I wanted to share my own personal experience with the outage, too. Gearing up for the Super Bowl, I\u2019ve been in a sports gaming mood as…<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1120088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-polygon"],"yoast_head":"\nThe PlayStation outage was a reminder of how few games I actually own | Arcader News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This weekend, Sony\u2019s PlayStation Network was down for more than 24 hours, one of the longest unscheduled outages for a major gaming network in recent\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/the-playstation-outage-was-a-reminder-of-how-few-games-i-actually-own\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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