Sony has confirmed that PlayStation Stars is coming back, but not all at once.
The official webpage for PlayStation Stars on the official PlayStation website now has this message:
“PlayStation Stars will be returning soon in phased regional rollouts. Thank you for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you back.”
PlayStation Stars is Sony’s rewards system, where you can earn points and exchange them for digital collectibles, including 2D and 3D images. There is a dedicated section where you can view the rewards you have earned in your console, with its own virtual display case.
Sony has made it clear that these digital collectibles are not NFTs, which seems to have ended questions if these non-NFT collectibles have a substantial carbon cost. Nonetheless, this was something PlayStation came up with to get their players to keep using their consoles, even if they aren’t playing games or consuming content.
As reported by PSU, the PlayStation Stars has been in an outage for 26 days, which is longer than the 24 day period of the infamous 2011 Sony hack. That hack compromised 77 million accounts across PSN and Sony Entertainment Network.
As for now, there is no reason to believe that this PlayStation Stars outage is because of a hack or if any accounts where compromised. It’s possible that Sony simply encountered technical issues for its systems to keep it running across the globe.
For what it is worth, it is possible that Sony is keeping mum on a potential hack, and also possible compromise on user accounts. While there is a need to inform consumers, they may have been stopped from making public announcements if they were told not to do so by the authorities, if the ongoing investigation will be compromised by such an announcement, etc.
If the situation is something like that, we will eventually find out one way or the other. But if this the case, it doesn’t seem likely that PlayStation Stars will lead to as serious a compromise as the 2011 PSN hack. The rewards programs is not based on real money transactions, and instead operates on you doing things on Sony’s platform that the system recognizes.
If no security compromise is involved, this is all at least a bad look for the company. Aside from the 2011 PSN hack, last year’s ransomware attack on Insomniac is still fresh in many gamer’s minds. Sony has an incentive to get the program back and running as soon as possible, and to also demonstrate that no serious issues led to its downtime.
