The PlayStation Network was down for around twenty-four hours. Means I couldn’t go online to play Destiny 2, means I couldn’t download It Takes Two, means I couldn’t update Star Wars: Outlaws with its myriad patches. Which was fine, wasn’t really planning on any of that on Friday (Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is the current game of choice and there was a new episode of Severance I had to watch). Of course, it reminds me of when the PSN went down for a few weeks back in 2011, somehow an event that coincided with a few three-day weekends that I’d hoped to spend playing Uncharted 2 online. It was frustrating, but hey, what cha gonna do? Still had plenty of discs to pop into my PS3 and games to while away those weekends.
Things are a lot different now than they were in 2011. For starters, I have far fewer physical games for my PS5 than I did my PS3 — while Outlaws and Guardians of The Galaxy were picked up on sale, most of the games I get I grab digitally or, these days, are from the PSN subscription library. All digital, many saved on my PS5’s hard drive, most of them offloaded to the internet, ready to be downloaded again.
Until, of course, they can’t be.
The PlayStation Network won’t be around forever and when it’s gone all those digital games I don’t have saved will be gone too. I offloaded Spider-Man, a game I love, to make room for others, but if the PSN was to go away I wouldn’t be able to get it back (even though I, y’know, bought it with my hard-earned money). It’d still be playable, so long as I had a local copy of it, though.
But not everything is. Uncharted 2’s multiplayer servers were taken offline a few years ago and I can’t revisit that mode and maps I really enjoyed — though the single-player is still there. Don’t know if the same will be said for Destiny 2, the console game I’ve put the most hours into over the past few years. It’s an always-online game where even if you’re doing single-player activities you still need to be connected to the servers. Unless they create an offline mode, when those servers go offline so to will my ability too play those strikes and dungeons. The character I’ve put around a thousand hours into will be gone. Destiny 2 will be a memory and I won’t be able to play it over a decade later and reminisce.
Physical games too will suffer. I have a physical copy of Star Wars: Outlaws but I want to play it in its patched state and so I will need to have my PS5 connected to the internet to download those patches. If the PSN isn’t there neither are these patches. Buy the disk and you’re stuck with an unfinished game. Woe betide anyone who picks up Cyberpunk 2077 and can’t update it to its much better, much patched version.
There’s no obvious solution here (besides building a gaming PC and taking steps to ensure the games you want are always available offline), just an observation of where things are now compared to where we were a decade and change ago. So much more is online and subscription-based (wanna buy Photoshop? Nah, gotta get a subscription) and we don’t always realize just how reliant on it we were until it’s taken away. If the games coming out these days are going to become classics like Halo and Balloon Fight then there’s gonna have to be a way to keep playing them as their infrastructure goes away. I’m not sure what all that would entail, but with so many great games out right now, I’d hate for them to fade away into the ether with the flip of a switch.
Essays, Not Rants! 