Sony announced today it will be bringing down the PlayStation Network for more than seven hours of maintenance on Monday, Aug. 25. The service will be down roughly from 12:40 p.m. to 7:50 p.m. Eastern Time, 9:40 a.m. to 4:50 p.m. Pacific Time.
Sony says during the seven-hour gap, the company will be deploying a series of back-end improvements to the network, though why it's being done in the middle of the day and not late at night is unknown. During the downtime, players will be unable to access the PSN store to buy games or downloadable content. Account management and account registration services will also be offline. PSN users who have logged in to the service anytime before Aug. 20 will still be able to access online entertainment services like Netflix and play games online.
It is likely some of the "back-end improvements" coming to the service on Monday are a direct result of the hammering PSN took last month during the Destiny beta, which brought the PSN service to its knees as hundreds of thousands of players all attempting to redeem and download the beta for developer Bungie's anticipated sci-fi shooter at the same time proved too much for PSN. The beta was available exclusively on PlayStation consoles first, before being opened up to Xbox players a week later. More than 4.6 million gamers across all platforms played the beta for the 10 days it was online, despite the initial technical difficulties from PSN.
Though Microsoft's Xbox Live service is often heralded as superior to that of PSN, it doesn't seem to be holding Sony back. At Gamescom two weeks ago Sony announced more than 10 million PlayStation 4 consoles had been sold worldwide, putting it well ahead of Microsoft's Xbox One console. Upcoming updates to PlayStation 4 and PSN were also detailed at the trade show, most notably the "Share Play" update.
Described as a virtual couch by Sony, Share Play lets your online friends jump in and play games with you or for you for a limited time, even if they don't own the game themselves. Sony is planning on releasing Share Play in system update v2.00, scheduled for release sometime this fall. In addition to Share Play, v2.00 will also add more broadcast and share features, including the option to upload game footage and dedicated app support for YouTube. Additional features will also be coming in the update, and Sony says it will have more news in the coming months.
