By Nelson Schneider - 02/16/25 at 02:41 AM CT
Well, PlayStation Network, a.k.a., PSN, went and had another major outage that lasted a couple days. Even worse, this most recent failure of their online infrastructure revealed that, far from the cheerleaders of “simple” and “reasonable” game-sharing and DRM features they pretended to be when the Xbox One was threatening potential customers with an always-online hellscape of DRM and disc-checks, Sony is actually just as bad as Microsoft intended to be.
It seems that plenty of folks went out and grabbed the sold-separately PS5 optical disc drive during the outage in order to play physical copies of their games, only to discover that the PS5 optical drive won’t work without phoning home to PSN first. This has, apparently, been a known issue for a year already, but with the flagging popularity and relevance of both physical media and PlayStation in general, it’s the type of thing that didn’t make a splash among any of the activist-driven James Gournalism outlets of the Legacy Media, and was instead the purview of niche interest Sub-Reddits and YouTubers.
As if we needed any more reasons to distrust the console makers with an all-digital ecosystem, we’ve got Sony showing that, once again, they are dead set on protecting their rights to revoke the end-users’ licenses vs. creating a valuable, long-term ownership position in any of their consoles.
