Yesterday Sony Online Entertainment announced that the restoration of service to its games had finally begun, as well as its forums and websites. Today, in a Q&A post on its blog, Sony offered a more thorough look at what PSN customers will finally regain access to. Social media manager Jeff Rubsenstein addressed users’ “more pressing queries,” possibly the most important of them being clarification on what exactly is working.
Rubenstein says login to PSN and Qriocity is now up (be sure to reset those passwords), as are online gaming for the PS3 and PSP, PS3 video playback, Qriocity’s Music Unlimited service, friend chatting and networking services, in-game leaderboards, PlayStation Home, and applications including Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and MLD.tv. Rubenstein also explained that PlayStation plans to play catch-up when it comes to new publications that were missed during the outage. “Rest assured that you won’t miss any of this great content…we’ll be publishing to the PlayStation Store multiple times per week once commerce functionality is restored.” Rubenstein specifically mentioned missed titles like Under Siege and the MotorStorm Apocalypse demo.
It’s a big jump back into fully featured services after a month of PSN darkness. Unfortunately, this is the most detailed that PlayStation was able to get about the renewed services. The SOCOM 4 multiplayer community will have to sit tight and wait for an announcement as to when the service is fully restored, and the missed Call of Duty: Black Ops Double XP weekend hasn’t been scheduled yet. Most pressing, there are still no details on the “Welcome Back” offer for PSN customers. Sign-up for the new and improved protection system’s also hangs in the air.
But we should probably expect baby steps. PSN is clawing its way back from the brink of destruction, and if it’s taken this long for Sony to even address the initial problem of getting the system back up, we’d better be patient when it comes to its inner workings. Considering the botched job it did when initially dealing with the outage and the controversy over waiting to inform users, these are some relatively big steps in the right direction.
