Is Sony's PSN Outage the Beginning of the End of Online Gaming?

As I write this, it’s been ten days since Sony’s PSN and Qriocity services went offline as the long Easter weekend was starting. In the blink of an eye, gamers were left in the dark.

Message boards and Twitter lit up with irate gamers wondering what the deal was. People who’d just shelled out $60 for hotly anticipated online-enabled titles like Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat found out their purchases were rendered hobbled, and as Easter weekend continued, the restlessness grew.

As the “day or two” downtime estimate came and went, Sony eventually fessed up that there had indeed been a security breach and that they took down the network themselves to isolate and investigate the problem; a later update said the network outage was “indefinite."

As many gamers with credit card information stored on file for use in purchasing downloadable games feared (a group that includes myself), after the Easter weekend Sony admitted personal data was accessed and stolen, and while they didn’t think financial information was compromised, they couldn’t guarantee it, either. The bit at the end saying they estimated “some” services “should” be back in a week was hardly a salve for our anger. Sony later stated the data is encrypted (and therefore useless), but some reports are claiming hackers have card numbers up for sale.

A huge problem here for Sony is perception. They’re one of those companies that the public feels should be outright immune to this, and now we’re let down. We trusted Sony to keep our information safe, and they failed miserably. And our American press has been relatively kind, with some major outlets relegating it to their technology news sections; the British, not so much, where it’s front-page news and causing Sony even bigger PR headaches.

Can Sony survive this? Yes, but during this week’s planned re-launch they have to begin the process of repairing consumer confidence and restoring goodwill, to say nothing of costs that could be as high as $24 billion dollars. Could they survive a second successful attack? It’s probably best for them not to have to find out.

And when entire networks aren’t being hacked, the most popular games are constantly under assault. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2—the second most-popular online console title—was rendered nearly unplayable on PS3 over the winter due to issues in Sony’s network security; gamers found themselves stripped of all their online progress and match after match was plagued with altered game physics (think decreased gravity and nearly frictionless ground) or other annoyances.

Then just last week the Xbox 360 version suffered a compromise (one that I've experienced firsthand) that was part of a phishing scam. While it’s apparently harmless to your system, an infection mod passed from person to person like the common cold, displaying multicolored messages touting websites over significant portions of the screen; when your game life depends on being able to see your enemy, that’s not a minor issue. But what if things that aren’t harmless crop up?

Could gamers ever decide they’ve had enough? What if people decide online videogames aren’t worth the hassle if it means dealing with companies who don’t take safeguarding our personal information very seriously? Or if hackers get so good at their ‘craft’ that networks come down so frequently that just finding a time when the system is functioning properly is a chore? Or if a way to get viruses on our consoles is devised?

Could a major publisher announce it’s scrapping the online portion of a game because networks aren’t stable enough for their customers to play consistently, so they consider it a waste of resources to develop? And then would others follow suit?

Will we read a wistful ‘decade in review’ article in December of 2019, melancholy over the demise of online gaming that started with “The Great PSN Collapse of ‘11?"

Do I think any of that will happen? No. That's all doom-and-gloom, and I’m quite confident that nothing close to that scenario will ever play out. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will learn a lot from this debacle, they’ll all improve their defenses to stay ahead of the hackers, and we’ll be happily playing our PS4s online in 2020.

But a scary lesson can be taken from the many predictions and models from climate scientists about Arctic ice melt that included worst-case doom-and-gloom scenarios for how fast we could lose icebergs and glaciers—those worst-case projections ended up being woefully short of what’s been the reality. Gamers will just have to hope I know the future better than those scientists.

Jeff is currently playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters and Portal 2; follow him on Twitter at JKLugar.