Sony’s PlayStation Network was heavily disrupted over the Christmas period, which kept paying customers from their content and services. To make up for this, the company is extending people’s PS+ subscriptions and offering a future discount on a PlayStation Store purchase.
Here’s the deal, and its announcement message, in full (the compensation is bolded).
Hi Everyone,
Happy New Year! Since access to PlayStation Network was impacted during the holidays, we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience by offering all PlayStation Plus members that had an active membership or free trial on December 25th a membership extension of five days. The extension will be automatically applied, so no action is necessary to receive the extension. We will post additional information here on PlayStation.Blog when the extension becomes available. If your membership or trial ends before the extension is available, you will receive five days of Plus to enjoy once the extension becomes available (we will notify you when).
In addition, sometime this month we will announce that for a limited time, we will be offering a 10 per cent discount code good for a one-time discount off a total cart purchase in the PlayStation Store as a thank you to all PSN members.
This discount can be used toward content available on PS Store including blockbuster new releases, award winning indie games, game add-ons and season passes, and an enormous selection of TV and Movies.
In case you missed it, click here to read about all the great games included in the January 2015 PlayStation Plus Instant Game Collection lineup.Thanks again to all our loyal PlayStation fans and welcome to our newest console owners. Wishing you all a very happy holiday.
Comments
30 responses to “Sony Offering Discounts, PS+ Extensions After PSN Downtime”
EU region version of the announcement: http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2015/01/01/holiday-thank-you/
Or the Instant Game Collection for January: http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2014/12/31/ps-plus-january-infamous-first-light-swapper-woah-dave/ (which is the same as the US for a change)
What do you mean “for a change”?
The Eu and US PS+ deals have been the same since the 27th August announcements.
I just can’t bring myself to pay Sony money for an online service they can’t keep online, or bring back online quick enough after issues. Lost all my faith after the three week outage on the PS3 a couple of years ago when it was free, and now this has just proven it’s not much better when you pay.
As far as I’m concerned you have no concept of value.
When it was free and went down, you lost $0.
It went down for 2 days and you’re complaining about being given 5 for free?
I’m not defending Sony here, but seriously? You’d be better off playing a board game or cards- it’s free and 100% failproof.
I lost zero dollars, and the ability to use my console and games I had bought for three weeks. Gave up on Sony and bought a 360 when they went Slim and Metro, had two outages on Xbox Live. Day Two for the One (day one for the US), and this Boxing day. Straight back up in both cases.
Xbox live also went down and yet there is no issue in giving them money. Only a hypocrite would make sense of that.
Also for the record, Microsoft brought the service back up straight away yes, but Sony apparently performed maintenance afterwards. Whether or not a fix was implemented or they just checked things out is a Sony memo I’d rather not read.
I’d be highly critical of a service which pops back up online immediately after an issue with no investigation- after all you are paying for a service and people to service your account.
At the end of the day, two days or 3 weeks being enough to drive you away from an entire console really shows your dependence upon virtual reality- grab a book or go for a walk. Clouds have silver linings.
You also forgot you can still play your games fine without the online component. But most importantly out of all of this is it is not Sony or MS fault that some little wanker shits DDoS’d the crap out of their online services. Not to mention even ebay, amazon etc got hacked this year too.
By dknigs logic he must blame the rape victim for not squeezing her legs together hard enough. Damn entitled sooks.
Here’s the thing though, you’re defending Sony for something they openly admit was unacceptable. The ‘free’ stuff we’re getting now was paid for in inconvenience and Sony aren’t pretending otherwise. The bonus days and discount are specifically designed to convince @dknigs up there to stay with them. I’m not burning my PS4 but I think it’s perfectly understandable if a few free days of a monthly subscription service isn’t enough to restore his faith in their networks ability to function properly when he wants to play.
I mean if you found a rat in your soup you probably wouldn’t chose to eat there again while there are other alternatives, even if the chef did give you another bowl of soup and a 10% off coupon. You probably wouldn’t even consider eating there even after they proved that their kitchen was now 100% rat free.
As far as your analogy goes, I don’t think it’s a good one considering your example poses significant health risks and so there are huge reasons not to accept those failings. This is just an online service going down for a few days. Sure, it’s not ideal and he’s perfectly within his rights to deem Sony’s service is crap, but c’mon…. it’s technology and things will never be up 100% of the time. To argue that Sony has shit online services compared to Microsoft based only on this just screams ‘fanboy’ to me.
Also, @dknigs, how has this proven the service isn’t much better when you pay? You just stated a three week outage on PS3 when the service was free, and now there has been an outage of A COUPLE OF DAYS for a paid service in comparison. That’s a reduction in downtime of 2-2.5 weeks. Going off those facts, that’s a significant improvement.
The three week outage was what smashed my rose tinted glasses on Sony, the total lack of improvements after being ahead the beginning of last gen as well as the lacking quality of online services are what made me want to leave, while Microsoft’s XBL quality, and the vast improvements in the OS and console toward the end of last generation drew me in.
Are you also completely ignoring the fact that it took Sony THREE DAYS to get PSN back online, while XBL was back online within 30 mins of the attack finishing? Seems like excusing Sony for that is the work of a fanboy to me. At the end of the day, what’s better. A terrible free service which bitterly disappoints and then improves a little bit after becoming pay, when one of their promotional selling points was the fact it was free? Or a service that was pay all along, never tried to sell you on being free, and kept the quality the whole time?
Admittedly it’s a bit more extreme, although I have to point out that Sony’s network security and their ability to respond to the unexpected is the heart of this issue and they’ve had some very serious issues arise from it. The big PSN hack a few years ago actually did pose a serious risk to the users.
The core of the example however is that it takes a bit more than just an apology to restore a users faith in their ability to maintain the network, especially when there are easily accessible alternatives. I know that Microsoft have an insane advantage over Sony when it comes to that stuff, it’s not just a gaming network it’s part of a much larger global setup worth a lot more than a few million subscriptions, but the advantage is still an advantage.
I’ll happily continue to use the PSN but I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in it or Sony’s ability to run it at the required level for it to be such a core part of the console’s operating system. I’ll cut them some slack there because it’s not easy to run something like the PSN, mistakes will happen, but at the end of the day they chose to make the PSN such a vital part of the console and thus they chose to have their console experience tied very closely to the PSN’s performance.
I guess in the end it all depends on what you use your console for. I’m not a huge online gamer so at worst, when a console’s online services are down, I just get inconvenienced if I wanted to download my ‘free’ games at that time. When all of this happened, it had little impact on me.
I can appreciate that Microsoft has a better online service (I barely touched my PS3 last gen and spent most of my gaming time on the 360) and if people feel that playing online is at the core of their gaming experiences, then yes, Microsoft is probably the way to go.
@dknigs I was replying to your comment that the PSN service isn’t much better now that you have to pay for it. Going off what you said, my argument still stands that a downtime of a couple of days is significantly better than a three-week outage. I never said Sony had a better online service than Microsoft.
All I’m saying is why would I pay the same money for an inferior service that can’t match the competition?
Cause it is not the same money tit for tat or inferior. You are making that argument for yourself.
Ahhh the old “0mfg you’re only paying $y you get what you’re given” devil’s advocate scenario. Similar to the “yeah? well if you don’t like x i’d like to see you do better.”
The bigger issue is that PSN dies. A lot. Whether by outside influence or design, PSN goes down more often than a cheap hooker. Very rarely do we get an apology. Rarer still do we get compensatoin.
Shit happens
Exactly. When it went down I didn’t whinge like a bitch, I played far cry and gta offline.
Those of us with digital libraries couldn’t even launch the games to play them single player. PSN and XBL being down effectively bricked our consoles.
Blame the DDos wankers not the service providers. You can’t have a fool proof system. We the consumer and the companies are all victims of the damn script kiddies.
Oh I do blame the LS. The thing that bothers me is when people like ‘haz’ come out and say we are “whinging like bitches”, when he can at least still play his disc, while we can’t even run a single player game.
Yeah I can appreciate you point too, don’t get me wrong.
My digital PS4 stuff still launches without a net connection. Is that not the same for you? You referring to XB or PS?
If you “purchase” the PSN monthly games you can’t play them while PSN is down. Which I guess makes sense. No less annoying, since we’re basically paying $10 a month to rent the game, but makes sense.
X1. I loaned my ps4 to a mate that hadn’t played TLOUR. He still has it.
I guess spending time with your family during Christmas was too much to bear.
You’re damn straight. I did the obligatory stuff, but screaming children and judgemental extended family isn’t my idea of a good time.
Exactly. FFS, people have to get over this bull shit of expecting everything to be perfect. Don’t be so god damn pathetic and ungrateful. Sony (and Microsoft) have a service that has to support tens of millions of people. Services, that for the most part, work flawlessly. If some group of assholes want to bring down the service, they’ll find a way. So what, you lost a few days of online gameplay while they got things up and running. Not really a lot of time in the scheme of a lifetime… Unless you’re a butterfly.
Everyone, take a deep breath.
If you were sitting next to me I’d hug you.
Group hug!
I hear ya… The Sony network goes to water far too easily.
But hey… Peeps just need to hate on Microsoft.
Peeps constantly hate on both of them relentlessly. Management at both these companies must want to stab some of their never happy, entitled fanboys and girls. The are damn game consoles not hospital life support systems.