Wednesday April 20th, 2011. Millions of Playstation players would come home from either school or work to find out they can’t use any online service on their Playstation 3 due to an outage. Every attempt to try to connect online would end with a “undergoing maintenance” message. This outage would last for 24 days leaving 77 million PSN accounts unable to access any online services on their Playstation 3 or Playstation Portable devices. 

Fortunately, if you had your games already downloaded or a physical copy, you were still able to play them offline until services started to come back online Saturday May 14th, 2011. Nearly 14 years later on Friday, February 7th, 2025, Playstation would have another outage across Playstation 3, Playstation Vita, Playstation 4, and Playstation 5 devices leaving 123 million PSN accounts unable to connect to any online service through PSN. This outage didn’t last as long as the one from 2011 (nearly 24 hours), but the effects of this one shows how devastating this could’ve been if it lasted longer. 

We live in a more digital age where everything needs an internet connection to function. Though the internet was very much a part of our society in 2011 it was nowhere near as essential as it is today. During the 2011 outage many people were still able to play games, watch movies, and listen to music as the ps3 online infrastructure wasn’t as strict as it is today, and most importantly physical media was still a big part of our mainstream culture. 

Bluerays, DVDs, and CDs were still in use by the masses, and when the internet went down we were still able to access the content we spent our hard earned money on. But in the current day many of us don’t even have a way to use a physical disc with the rise of digital only consoles. This makes us more reliant on digital media, but with digital media needing to connect to a server in order to function, if that server goes down then you’re just out of luck, and everything you spent your money on is just inaccessible.

This just doesn’t apply to video games, movies, books, songs, and tv shows, all require an internet connection to function properly. We might usually have a constant internet connection but when it goes down problems start to arise. Sure you can download all of these things on your device’s local storage to access them, but many of us don’t want to do that. We all subscribed to a streaming service to have instant access to digital items without any hassle on our part. But when things go down on their end now we can’t access stuff that we are paying for, and even if you downloaded it you usually only have access to it for a certain amount of time offline before you need to connect their servers to renew the license.

When we pay for digital entertainment we aren’t paying for ownership, we are paying for a license, and licenses eventually expire and need to be renewed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With this business model, companies can mitigate digital piracy of their products. Most digital products are coded in a way to not work if the license can’t be verified by their servers. Companies do this to prove that their products were obtained by legitimate means. This method works near perfectly, but it has one major flaw. If those servers go down, everything that we paid for no longer works.

Then there is physical media. Sure physical media may take up space and to some looks like an eyesore, but when you pay for it you have ownership of it. As long as your device and the disc work you can just use it regardless of an internet connection or not.

Unfortunately, our mega companies hate physical media and would rather you buy all of your media digitally. “Players should get used to not owning their games.” – Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay.

With digital media, companies make more of a  profit since they don’t have to manufacture discs, and they have more control over their customers. This business model is actively harming us consumers. Even worse than a server going down if a company goes under and you bought stuff with their service all of those goods are now gone. This is why physical media needs to stay, so we the consumers can keep the goods that we rightfully paid for.