Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why

• Godort@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Sure, but if it were free it’s a “you get what you pay for” situation. People are a lot more forgiving when they aren’t personally losing money.

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• ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur’s Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.

  Then beyond that, you’ve got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don’t even connect to Sony’s servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty’s multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony’s dime. And beyond that…the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are seeing that free online play on PC and leaving consoles.

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  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You’re mixing stuff up, the direct connect for multiplayer where you put the IP has nothing to do with authentication that he’s talking about. Whenever you open up a multiplayer game it will authenticate yourself with PSN using the account you have on the playstation, then if your authentication succeeded it will authenticate with the game service-servers which will reply with stuff like your progression in the game, whether someone has sent you a message or a friend request, etc. Modern games are a platform in and of themselves, essentially they have an entire Discord on steroids internally which you’re using before, during and after playing online matches. If the PSN is down you can’t authenticate with those servers… I mean, they could allow you to login using username and password, but that’s: 1 not needed since the PSN is almost never down and 2 probably against some TOS from Sony for you to release games on their platform. So if the PSN is down you would not be able to get into the main screen for multiplayer anyways, so there’s no place where you could input the IP for the game-server you want to connect to.

    I’m not defending the system, but it is what it is, games have organically evolved to have all of these social features which people do use and like, it makes sense that Sony won’t allow you to go over them and authenticate directly with the game specific service-servers and it makes sense that if you’re relying on all of that for login you also rely on it for matchmaking (which is where the IP would come in place). Could it be better? Sure, but there’s no incentive for it to be, PSN is rarely down and games (at least large ones) take forever to be sunset, and by that time there are almost no people playing them anyways.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m not mixing anything up. If they allowed for things like direct IP connections, you could still play Baldur’s Gate 3, online, regardless of this downtime. It wasn’t organically that we arrived here. It’s objectively worse.

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      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        This is the relevant bit of what you’re replying to:

        I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?

        None of that comes from the game-server but rather from the service-server. Even if social games that have those features allowed you to connect to a server directly, you would still need to connect to their servers for all of that stuff.

        Direct IP connection has nothing to do with authentication and social flows (e.g. names and progress like the comment you’re replying to mentioned) and would not help in the slightest with it.

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  • dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.

    I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

    However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

      It sounds like that requirement is just a bad deal for the consumer. And they charge you for it. And they can’t guarantee uptime.

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      • dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).

        No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.

        Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.

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• herrvogel@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Nobody’s gonna dispute the necessity of some sort of server somewhere in the mix. But does it need to be something like PSN? A central 3rd party service that most games only use because they’re forced to?

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  • dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.

    It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.

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• 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Free your mind! There is another way. Video game servers should be open-source, and the games should permit you to choose a custom server. This way, games can survive the bankruptcy of their creators’ companies.

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  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I don’t disagree completely, but it’s not as easy as you think. We’re not talking about server in the sense of a headless game client that will coordinate a match, we’re talking about a whole infrastructure of micro services and a web of communications and APIs just to get a basic authentication working. Not to mention possibly encrypted hard coded addresses to contact. That being said I 100% agree that before a game is abandoned a plan should be put in place to allow people to keep playing it, even if it’s complicated and cumbersome to setup, or even if it’s as crude as removing authentication entirely.

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    • dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      This would basically be my reply as well. Companies are in the game to make money, and setting up all this infrastructure, not to mention maintaining it, is NOT cheap.

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