PSN Downtime Raises Fresh Questions About PS5's Future Functionality | Push Square

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In an era where gaming increasingly emphasises online connectivity, there are undeniable benefits, like the unprecedented connectivity we enjoy in our games and the way titles can be updated and improved post-release in response to feedback.

But there are issues, too. While it’s (mostly) sunshine and rainbows while the servers are running, many worry that in a faraway future, their games may be rendered obsolete once the power’s been turned off.

One post on X (or Twitter) which went viral during this weekend’s PSN outage pertained to the PS5 Pro’s disc drive, which if you’ll remember, requires a one-time handshake with Sony’s servers to be activated.

An industrious user took the opportunity during the outage to test whether his disc drive would connect while PSN was down, and as expected, it didn’t. To be clear, any disc drive that’s already been connected to the PS5 Pro would play physical games just fine during the down time, but it wasn’t possible to properly pair the accessory during the outage.

The concern here is that in the faraway future, this could render physical games incompatible with the PS5 Pro (and PS5 Slim Digital Edition), as should PlayStation power down its servers, you wouldn’t be able to connect the disc drive to the console at all.

It’s worth pointing out that there are layers to Sony’s network infrastructure, and while yesterday’s outage was a particularly bad one, connecting a disc drive doesn’t necessarily need the entirety of the PSN to be online.

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Furthermore, a firmware update in the future could theoretically enable disc drives to be connected without requiring a handshake with PlayStation’s servers.

So, there’s nothing to be immediately concerned about here, but it’s always worth raising questions about future game preservation, and there’s no doubt this generation – with its enormous reliance on online connectivity – is the most precarious thus far.

Our hope is that,