Two years ago, almost exactly, Sony introduced PlayStation Stars, a rewards program paired with digital collectibles you can display in your account. But for reasons that remain largely unclear, PlayStation Stars was offline for the better part of a month, longer than the infamous PSN outage in 2011.
Now, after hitting that unfortunate metric, Sony is reportedly turning the lights back on, reassuring players that no, the program is not going away and their points were not lost. Right now, they are doing a rolling start to get it back up, region by region. So far that includes Asia, but the Americas and Europe should be soon. Here in the US it still displays the “PlayStation Stars is not available at this time” message that’s been there since early June, the service going offline around PlayStation’s State of Play back then. But here is the message in the PSN app now:
“PlayStation Stars will be returning soon in phased regional rollouts,” it reads. “Thank you for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you back.”
While this outage was happening there was conflicting information about what was going on in the interim. Support at one point said that players should wait on any purchases (uhh not great for Sony) until it was resolved in order to get credit. Another said players would not lose any reward points, even for purchases made then. I guess we’re about to find out exactly what the answer is.
There is also no word about compensation from Sony for the month of inconvenience of the service being down. Again, there is only speculation about what actually happened here, as all players got was an “our engineers are aware of the problem” message for the entire month. It may have to do with Sony’s backend PS infrastructure changes, but they never officially said, from what I can tell.
Here is a refresh on what PS Stars actually is, a program I forgot about after a switch to PC as my main platform (but I’m back for Shadow of the Erdtree!). You earn Stars currency that can be spent in the PS Store on some items if you:
- Do a “monthly check-in” which just means you have played any PlayStation game that month.
- Others will ask you to win tournaments set up for this program.
- Complete specific trophies.
- Or there are hyper, hyper specific rewards, like being the first player to platinum a blockbuster title in your time zone.
So hopefully it will be back on in the US soon, as seems to be the plan. I really wonder what happened here, as this seems very weird.
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