PSN Outage and what it could mean for NGP

Sony is planning a neat cloud-storage save system for its NGP and PS3. Hopefully you will still be able to save games locally, because if we get hit by Sony's current PSN outage in the future, all of sudden everyone goes back to a Level 1 Dwarf on whatever role-playing game you're in to.

The PSN incident (which Sony say will now see the store and services closed until Wednesday) and Amazon's similar outage highlight the perils of storage your stuff in the cloud. Amazon already offer a cloud storage service for your music. Apple and Google will do the same soon - what happens when that service becomes unavailable - despite these companies' promises of 99.95% uptime and multiple redundancies in the systems.

The current situation is annoying a lot of gamers, some of whom pay for the privilege, it is stopping people spending money with Sony on PSN and generating a lot of bad PR. That's being made worse by Sony refusing to say what is really going on and only hinting at a resolution - being upfront and honest would go some way to mitigating the rising anger.

Imagine if that happens to a generation of NGP or other gamers reliant on the cloud and online infrastructure, especially when even offline single player games need an online authentication system, there will be much more bad press and possibly legal investigations should that go wrong.