Sony’s PlayStation Network has been down for about a week now, cutting off PlayStation 3 and PSP owners from a variety of services. This includes the ability to play the hotly anticipated Portal 2 online… a real head-slapper, since for some people the whole point of the game is its online co-op. But while Xbox 360 owners smile smugly and gloat about the rock-solid reliability of Microsoft’s platform, we’re less interested in kicking Sony while they’re down (the rest of the Internet’s already taking care of that for us). Instead, we’d like to look at the broader history of this sort of failure across the game industry.
The PSN outage isn’t the first time a hardware company’s screw-ups or simple bad decisions have come between fans and their games. Heck, it’s not even the worst we’ve ever seen. So while you’re fuming over your useless PS3 Internet connection and vowing never to buy another Sony product again, just remember that making and selling games is a complicated business fraught with troubles. Sony’s not the first company to blow it, and they certainly won’t be the last. This little disaster means they’re in good company.
