PSN outage may extend to May 31, PS3 games remain offline

Written by Matt Swider on May 09, 2011

News: Sony delays when PSN will be back up, as hacked network continues to put online gaming on pause.

PS3 gamers were hoping to have PSN back online by now following the hack that forced its shut down on April 20. After all, the news out of Japan looked very positive last week when Sony held an overdue press conference in which it said that most services would be restored "within a week." But doing the math, May 1 plus 7 days in a week, May 8 has come and gone and the PSN outage continues into Monday, May 9.

Worse, PlayStation Network may remain offline until the end of the month if you take the word of Tokyo-based Sony spokesperson Shigenori Yoshida. He told Bloomberg this morning that the videogame company's "plan to restart the services fully by May 31 is unchanged."

Now, this could be a simple and unfortunate translation error. "Fully" may be in line with what the company had said about the PlayStation Store and Qriocity; restoration of those two specific services had been scheduled for the end of the month as of last week's press conference. Online gaming and access to PSN was supposed to come sooner. The fact that Yoshida used the word "unchanged" may give gamers a glimmer of hope that PSN will be back online before very distant May 31.

Whenever PSN goes back up, Sony has promised a "Welcome Back" program with free downloadable content for each territory. Additionally, the company will offer affected gamers a pair of free subscriptions: PlayStation Plus and Qriocity. There's still no announcement as to what this "free content" entails, but Gaming Target will keep you posted on the details as soon as representatives from Sony get back to us on the matter.

Are you missing out on games while PSN is down? Which ones? Comment below.