This would basically be my reply as well. Companies are in the game to make money, and setting up all this infrastructure, not to mention maintaining it, is NOT cheap.

You apparently can transfer saves on PS4/5 offline. For PS4 they can be copied to a USB drive, but more to your point here, the only way to copy PS5 saves around (besides PS+) are to do console backup and restore processes and then during that process say you want to take save games wholesale (and then restore them wholesale). That’s definitely greedy bullshit.

I don’t know what more to say, consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in. Within those walled gardens, the company dictates the rules. There’s plenty of good arguments for using a more open platform like PC. Not the least of which is that PlayStation has had an abysmal console cycle for trying to prove their console is worth purchasing - what with it having basically no exclusives that won’t eventually come to PC, first-party or otherwise.

From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).

No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.

Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.

Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.

It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.

Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.

I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.

Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?

Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially on console.