Given the time I think it was super interesting. I remember writing about it for the school paper when I was on the journalism team in high school, but at the time I didn’t think I wrote about it being in the gravitas that I’d give it today.
Back then, I didn’t consider things like online multiplayer and digital downloads an essential; to me they were so new to the industry, at least from a console standpoint. Mainly, I used PSN to download PS1 games and stream Netflix which to my knowledge then was also on a disc and I wondered why people would want to stream instead of owning a physical movie or show.
Looking back, I don’t think that today that sort of outage would have been handled with as much passiveness. Times and customs have changed. Today, speaking of Netflix and the like, If someone can’t immediately binge the latest Netflix show, they’re out of the loop. It’s telling that they recognized that this had weight to it, given they gave every person TWO free games to download when servers came back on.
I may not have played much of Infamous or Dead Nation, but estimating from my library, it was the start for me to realize that downloading games digitally was viable and convenient. It’s a treat going through my PS3 downloads chronologically to see the story of how things progressed, but I think after that point it was the realization that you could play full games off of a digital download, which to me at least previously, was unheard of.
The outage was horrendous and terrible, but to me, it also showed me the value of what wasn’t there when it was gone. It just took it to be gone for them to flaunt it in front of me.
Sorry for the long post, I just had this memory from when you mention this!
