Did you know? The Playstation Network was down!

The title is sarcastic if you didn't catch it.  If you are a gamer or PS3 owner, by now you have been fully informed and completely aware that the Playstation Network had been down for nearly a month.  The Playstation store, in fact, is still down.  This has caused a lot of strife for customers of Sony.  Sony has also lost millions in the service being down by having to repair and beef up its security, provide identity theft security and offer free games and content to all who were affected that have an account.  Indie developers have lost precious time for their games to be purchased through the store as well.  All in all, the hackers disabling the network has been very detrimental in most aspects.

Interestingly, it hasn't phased me in the slightest.  I am assuming I'm a rare but lucky case.  In fact everything about my PS3 owning career has developed by luck.  Only two months ago, my brothers and I struck a very good deal for a nearly new PS3.  Close to the same time we got deals for 5-6 games which in total price cost us less than just 1 of those games retail.  One night I absentmindedly put together a Playstation Network account, messed around in the simulation thing on it, and stopped just as quickly.  At the time we were all still very busy in school.  As the pace picked up in school, the PS3 network went down, largely unnoticed by us, save the media informing us.  We didn't/haven't really played online games for the PS3 as we normally do multiplayer games on the PC.  Even so, we were still able to watch Netflix on the PS3 even with the Network being down for some reason.

Finally the Network went back up more recently.  2 out of 5 PS3 games will be downloadable for free from the PS3 store when it goes back online.  As well, 2 out of 4 PSP games will be free for a time.  I am thinking for PS3, we will pick Infamous and Wipeout, two games that seemed to have gotten good reviews when they came out, both originally costing $60.00.  We're also entitled, like every PS3 Network user, to free identity theft security for a while, and the additional content users who subscribe to Playstation Plus receive.

If you can see where I am going with this, the Network going down, at least for the busy, has not been so bad.  I do really sympathize with those who have had the time to play lately and haven't been able to.  I especially feel bad for those people who purchased $60.00 games like Portal 2 and SOCOM when they just came out recently, only for the Network to go down and prevent them from trying the multi-player modes in them.  More so it has affected consumers perception of the strength of Sony's word, in regards to how the whole situation has been handled.  As well, if anyone did really lose any money from ID theft, that would definitely suck.  It's unfortunate Sony has to lose so much in rebuilding, but hopefully the network will be more protected now!