From Friday, February 7th to Saturday, February 8, 2025, the PlayStation network was down for 24 hours. During this time, Steam was able to enjoy a player growth and prove that it has an advantage over the PlayStation.
What is that advantage? Thanks to the PlayStation Network (PSN), Sony pushes its players an account for compulsory account at some games. For example, players must have a PSN account with a lot of games to play a game. Also often when it comes to a single player game.
There was a discussion about the game Helldivers 2, since Sony still asked for PSN access on other platforms, such as Steam, such as Steam. Since the servers of PSN were not online for 24 hours, it became so clear how dependent players depend on the functioning of the service, even if they only want to play offline.
Steam does not require this with his players. There is no certain account with the game platform to play a game offline.
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Steam is enjoying new number of players
Did Steam benefit from the failure? While the PSN fought to look for a solution to the problem, Steam was able to enjoy new number of users. On SteamdB you can see exactly how many new players from Friday, February 7th on Saturday, February 8th were added: there were a total of around 2 million new players.
It is clear that not all 2 million players absolutely have to be affected by the PSN failure and accordingly hiked over to Steam. However, the rapid climb is not inconsiderable and can have been influenced by it.
Another reason could be the big releases of the weekend: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Civilization 7. For the weekend, some players had definitely planned to try one or both of the games.
What exactly was the reason for the failure is still unclear. It remains to be seen whether Sony will continue to comment.
However, the whole thing has something good: Sony promised his players compensation for the long failure of the PlayStation networks. You can read more about this: PSN and Monster Hunter Wilds were down for a day: players can look forward to compensation