PSN and Sony's Troubled Connection

On September 6, 2016 I attempted to log into PlayStation Network (PSN) only to discover that it was offline. This isn’t surprising for me and many others users who have faithfully stuck by Sony as its online services have gone down time and time again. PSN is a paid for service and users have to sign up for a paid subscription called PlayStation Plus in order to play online games.  What makes this most recent outage more frustrating is the fact that it was recently announced that the cost of an online subscription is increasing, making customers pay more for a service that is inconsistent at best. It is true that Sony has not raised the cost of PlayStation Plus in quite some time but why should users pay more for a product that lacks features and is unreliable?

As far as I know Sony is offering no new features that warrant a price hike which is a shame because there are plenty of improvements that can be made. It would be nice if Sony would allow users to change their PSN username. I can only imagine the thousands of users that have names they made when they were younger only to realize that they sound absolutely ridiculous now. Microsoft has allowed users on Xbox Live to do this since the beginning. It seems bizarre that Sony has refused to introduce a name change feature. They could even charge a fee for each change and possibly make enough so they would not have to raise the cost of a PlayStation Plus subscription.

The remastered version of Skyrim is due out this October on consoles. One of the cool added features is the ability to download mods directly onto consoles which originally PC users has the luxury of having. In a shocking reversal Bethesda announced that they no longer would be bring mods to PlayStation 4 because “Sony would not approve user’s mods the way they should work.” An even bigger slap in the face is the fact that mod support will still be released on Xbox One. Sony totally dropped the ball on this one and quite possibly alienated many gamers who wanted to experience Skyrim with mods from the comfort of their couch instead of sitting at the computer desk.

As Sony continues to stumble into the holiday season there is a possibility that Xbox One may outsell PlayStation 4 for the first time. Even though Xbox Live has had similar outages to PSN it has been nowhere near as frequent. Microsoft has continued to listen to the feedback from their community and have made improvements because of it. Sony needs to start doing the same if they want to continue to have their loyalty. If not this may be the last year where Sony remains on top of the console race. 

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