The grinches may have stolen Christmas from many gamers, but you can’t stop capitalism.
Sony announced this morning that it will extend the length of its holiday sale in response to the lengthy outrage that kept many PlayStation Network subscribers offline over the last several days. The holiday sale will now run through to noon Jan. 6. The PSN Store’s “Flash Sale” will also get an extension through to noon tomorrow. Both were previously set to expire yesterday.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1633332,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"A"}']“We know many of you experienced issues connecting to PSN over the weekend,” reads a PlayStation blog post. “So in response to popular demand, PlayStation Store is extending our Flash Sale and Holiday Sale.”
This means you’ll have a chance to save on games like Destiny, Dragon Age: Inquisition (GamesBeat’s game of the year for 2014), and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
PSN went down on Christmas Day as the result of an alleged cyberattack. The Internet vandal group Lizard Squad took credit for the assault, and Sony confirmed its network collapsed due to malicious activity.
“The video game industry has been experiencing high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay,” Sony Computer Entertainment America consumer experience boss Catherine Jensen wrote in a blog on Sunday. “Multiple networks, including PSN, have been affected over the last 48 hours. PSN engineers are working hard to restore full network access and online gameplay as quickly as possible.”
PSN is back up and running now.
Sony isn’t alone in extending events as the result of the downtime. Destiny developer Bungie changed the expiration for one of the time-limited stores in its sci-fi shooter. The Xur character, which sells special items on the weekend, is open through today as well.
Bunche says it will return to its normal schedule this coming weekend.
Microsoft had its own outages on Christmas. Subscribers could not get online to play certain games, and many people could not sign into their Xbox Live profile. That kept a number of gamers from playing anything at all.
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Neither Sony nor Microsoft have announced anything about refunding or compensation for players. PlayStation Network and Xbox Live both have millions of paying premium members, and a significant portion of those people could not use the product they were paying for.