Nerdology

This is never good:

While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can.

“A full day or two” before PSN is up and running again.  Yikes.  Though we will probably never know, I would guess that Portal 2’s cross platform play (PS3 and PC) was just too awesome and was used too many people to buy it and it melted the PSN servers.  Oh well.  Hopefully it can be up and running again, until then, all you PS3 Portal players will have to use your free Steam copy for now.

[PlayStation Blog]

“We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system … We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.”

You heard it here.  Don’t turn on your PS3 hopefully we’ll have a fix soon.

Sony has had some issues today.  Some of you might remember the Great Zune Fiasco of 2008… but I understand if you don’t because it affected far fewer people.  Basically the same thing happened with the Zune.  Because there was a leap year when we reached the end of the calendar all the Zunes around the world cried out in anguish, and were suddenly silenced.  Microsoft didn’t even try and fix the problem, they just told everyone to wait a day and it would reslove itself.  It did.

Sony seems to be in the same boat.  (At the time of this writing) we don’t know for sure what has happened but if it is an internal clock issue, as the hive mind at NeoGaf believe, then waiting is the only option.  But waiting might not do it.  If the system is aptly confused we could have this problem tomorrow and the next day.  The other problem with just waiting is if waiting doesn’t work.  If the system can’t play discs and things are going south for your save data it might be difficult to update the firmware from the consumers side.

Debug units are also having problems.  Developers are reporting that the system gets stuck in a reboot cycle due to an endlessly looping error message.  That would brings certain aspects of PS3 development to a screeching halt.  Could a calendar be responsible for both of these problems?

43 firmware updates in a 3.25 year old product and console breaking bugs are being discovered… more than that, they are possibly killing PS3s. Thats not good at all.

What people aren’t talking about is the possibility that this is more than a local problem.  This could potentially be a server side problem as well.  And if that is the case the list of potential problems just grew 1000 fold.  Information on games you downloaded from the PSN are gone, your stats in online games are gone… Sony would see a huge backlash if the servers are affected by this.  But that’s a worst case scenario.

There are still so may questions and here we are 11 hours in with little reassurance coming from Sony.  Is this problem is actually corrupting save data and not just confusing the system for 24 hours?  We won’t know until things are back up and running… which could potentially be tomorrow.

I would have thought that after a company as large as Microsoft had a problem with hardware everyone else would have tested their products to make sure they didn’t run into a similar problem.  This is 2 major companies now that are having leap year problems in the last few years.  Figure it out guys.

It’s like watching a train wreck.  I guess not enough publishers hate the PS3 yet, and they’re looking for clean sweep.  According to MTV Multiplayer publishers have been paying a ”PlayStation Network Bandwidth Fee” since October 1st, 2008.

Publishers now see an itemized bill charging them 16 cents per gigabyte downloaded.  For paid DLC that fee stays attached for the length of time the DLC is on the service.  For free DLC the fee is only charged for the first 60 days that it is on the service.

Let’s put that in perspective.  The Resident Evil 5 demo weighs in at just about a gig and was downloaded 4 million times in it’s first month across PS3 and Xbox 360.  If these were all on the PS3 that would have Capcom paying 640,000 dollars to Sony.  640,000 dollars to people can play a demo?  That’s ludicrous.

I think what Sony is failing to see here is that eventually smaller publishers will stop putting content on their service.  Maybe it’s just demos. But if I play a demo on the Xbox and I like it, that’s the platform I’m going to purchase the game on.

You could argue that Microsoft charges 50 dollars a year for Xbox Live, but how many silver members are out there not paying anything.  Millions.  And if they grab content off Xbox Live like that Resident Evil demo, Microsoft foots the bill.  You know why? Because when the game comes out they’re going to buy it on their Xbox.

[MTV Multiplayer]