Sony’s promise: Will the PlayStation Store return in May?

Sony have made it clear that the PlayStation Store will return before the end of the month, and that there will be ‘partial restorations’ along the way, right from the beginning. Now that online play has been resumed, will Sony reach their promise of it being restored before the end of May? Here is a look at both sides of the argument.

Yes

Whilst people have been eager to restore their Dirt 3 online play codes, Sony have stood their ground, and stuck by their promise of restarting the PlayStation Store before June arrives. There have been rumours of return dates, such as May the 24th, come and past us. But there is some kind of hope still. The fact that Sony hasn’t changed their mind is a good indicator. Considering how they have to make sure it is stable, working, and secure before letting the public get their grubby hands on the store front, I couldn’t see why they would stick by a date if they knew it wouldn’t happen.

There was scheduled maintenance last week, as there always has been, but there is some ‘special’ maintenance next week on Tuesday from 19:00 to Wednesday 1:00 BST. Now, Sony have stated that PC, PSP and PS3 registration, the Store, PS3 and Qriocity account management will all be down during this time. This is interesting that they mention the Store will be down. It is not currently up, so why would you point this out? You could read into this, albeit hopefully, that it will open before then, and close during the downtime.

No

Atari’s Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale is due to be released on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade this week on Wednesday. PlayStation users queried whether this meant it would be up or not on the 31st for PSN, and got a rather negative response back. Atari’s twitter account had this to say:

This just in… looks like Playstation Network is not gonna be ready for #Daggerdale release on 5/31. Stay tuned for more details today.

We did stay tuned and they went on to say:

Earlier tweet wasnt intended to speak to Sony’s service coming back online or being delayed, but to inform our fans that we expect #Daggerdale to be placed in PSN’s launch queue behind other titles and that it might not hit the May 31 date

So that this can be seen in both a negative and positive way. Sony have stated before that titles that were due to be released during the downtime will be placed on a queue, with multiple store updates weekly until the backlog has been cleared. But as it was due out this day, it may come out with the normal store update, and not be delayed at all.

The planned maintenance also rules out it returning late on Tuesday night. This would have been an expected – if late – return for the store, as they could restore service at 23:59pm and it would count as being restored in May. Do they schedule maintenance automatically, or can they take it off early? We would assume the latter, as they will be manually carrying out maintenance themselves.

No-one, hopefully apart from Sony, knows when the Store will return.  If I was forced to say it will or won’t return… I’d have to go for yes. I hope it does for Sony’s sake, and what is the point in saying it won’t? One thing is for sure, we all just hope that it returns sooner rather than later.

Harry Barnes

Harry is a co-founder of aGamingSite, and has been behind the site from the start. When he is not playing games - which isn't often - he's probably listening to indie music no-one has heard of, playing guitar or football. His favourite game is Uncharted 2, and console PS2.

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