So here's how my nephew spent 90 minutes of his Christmas afternoon: sitting on my sister's couch, PS4 controller in his lap, staring at a "cannot connect to PlayStation Network" error over and over. He'd unwrapped the console at like 9am. By 2pm he still hadn't played a single online match of whatever shooter he'd begged for (I want to say it was Destiny, but honestly the kid has three games and I can't keep them straight anymore).
The reason, if you somehow missed it, is that a group calling itself Lizard Squad knocked both PSN and Xbox Live offline for a big chunk of Christmas Day, and residual flakiness carried into the days after. They'd apparently been threatening it for weeks and picked the single worst possible day to follow through — the one day of the year when the largest number of brand-new consoles are getting plugged in for the first time by kids who have zero patience for "try again later" error screens. I watched this happen in real time at a family gathering and it was genuinely funny in a bleak way, right up until my nephew asked me, an adult who is supposedly good with computers, to fix it, and I had nothing.
By the time I'm writing this, on the 31st, things seem to be mostly working again. Kim Dotcom apparently offered Lizard Squad some Mega vouchers to knock it off, which is its own weird little footnote to the story that I don't fully understand and don't feel like researching further right now.
The part that actually bugs me
I'm not going to pretend this is some huge revelation, but sitting there watching a ten-year-old unable to play a single-player-adjacent game because a server somewhere got DDoSed really crystallized something for me. We used to just play games. You put the disc in, or these days you download it, and it ran. Now half of what you paid $60 for lives on someone else's infrastructure, and if that infrastructure has a bad day, so do you.
I get why it happens this way. Multiplayer needs servers, matchmaking needs servers, achievements and cloud saves need servers. I'm not naive about the tradeoffs. But there's a difference between "this specific online mode is down" and "the console itself is basically an expensive brick because it insists on phoning home before it'll let you do anything," and a lot of games in 2014 blurred that line more than they needed to. My nephew couldn't even get into the game's menu screen without a network check succeeding first. That's a design choice, not a law of physics.
A smaller, unrelated complaint while I'm at it
Completely separate gripe, but since I'm already in a grumbling mood: I spent part of Boxing Day trying to set up a new wireless router because ours finally died, and the admin panel on this thing still looks like it was designed in 2003. Tiny gray text, a font that might be Tahoma, tabs that don't clearly indicate which one is active. Somebody at these router companies needs to sit down and actually use a modern website for like ten minutes before shipping firmware. That's it, that's the complaint. Not big enough for its own post but it's been eating at me all week.
Anyway. The outage thing overlaps, obviously, with the much bigger Sony story that's eaten December alive — I'm not going to rehash all of that here since it feels like every tech writer on the internet has already said everything there is to say about it, some of them several times. This was really just about watching that chaos land, in miniature, on my sister's living room couch, with a kid who has no idea who Lizard Squad is and just wanted his game to work.
We've got a new PS4 in the house now regardless, hooked up next to the aging Xbox 360 that's somehow still running fine after, what, seven years? There's a lesson in there about which of these boxes ages better, but I haven't fully worked it out yet, and it's New Year's Eve, and I have somewhere to be in about two hours. More on this in 2015, probably, once the servers have had time to calm down.