From Friday, February 7 to Saturday, February 8, 2025, the PlayStation Network was down for 24 hours. Steam experienced a player increase during this time and demonstrated that it has an advantage over PlayStation.
What is that advantage? Through the PlayStation Network (PSN), Sony imposes an account requirement for some games. Players must have a PSN account to play a whole lot of games, often even for single-player games.
There was a discussion surrounding the game Helldivers 2, as Sony required players on other platforms, such as Steam, to also have a PSN account. Since the PSN servers were offline for 24 hours, it became clear how dependent players are on the service’s functionality, even if they just want to play offline.
Steam does not impose this requirement on its players. On the gaming platform, no specific account is necessary to play a game offline.
Steam enjoys new player numbers
Did Steam benefit from the outage? While PSN struggled to find a solution to the problem, Steam was able to enjoy new user numbers. On SteamDB, one can clearly see how many new players joined from Friday, February 7 to Saturday, February 8: It was about 2 million new players in total.
It is clear that not all 2 million players necessarily had to be affected by the PSN outage and therefore migrated to Steam. However, the rapid increase is certainly significant and could have been influenced by it.
Another reason could be the major releases of the weekend: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Civilization 7. Many players likely intended to try out one or both of the games over the weekend.
What exactly the cause of the outage was is still unclear. It remains to be seen whether Sony will comment further on it.
However, something good has come from the whole situation: Sony promised its players compensation for the long outage of the PlayStation Network. You can read more about it on MeinMMO: PSN and Monster Hunter Wilds were down for a day: Players can look forward to compensation
