Online Gaming Services Taking a Huge Holiday Beating
The gaming networks took a beating on Christmas Day.
Looks as though Christmas Day was great for gamers worldwide, as the onslaught of traffic stemming from new hardware activations bombarded the likes of Microsoft's Xbox Live, Sony Entertainment Network, Nintendo's eShop, and even Valve's Steam platform to the point of going offline.
Currently, as of this writing, Nintendo's portion is the only one still down for the count across all four devices: Wii U, Wii, 3DS and DSi.
For starters, Kotaku revealed on Christmas Day evening that the Steam servers were down for most of the day. The platform is back up and running now, but there's speculation that the holiday deals may be behind the performance issues, such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Skyrim receiving a 75 percent discount. Left 4 Dead 2 costing absolutely nothing until Thursday afternoon probably didn't help the traffic issues.
On the console front, blame the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One being unwrapped and installed under the TV, and new hardware sales of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS/2DS. Game Informer provided a long list of updates covering the entire day, starting with word that Sony and Nintendo shops were offline. Eventually, the PlayStation Shop came back online, but Nintendo's eShop remained down.
By Game Informer's third update, the site saw that Steam went offline, and believed that Valve's free Left 4 Dead 2 offering was the culprit. Then by update #4, there were reports that Xbox Live was having stability issues while the Wii U began seeing improvement. Again, this was all happening on Christmas Day.
By the fifth update to Game Informer's original story, Xbox Live reportedly tanked in performance. Microsoft reported that social and gaming aspects were "limited." Meanwhile, Steam was mostly still up through the sixth and seventh updates, although the Steam storefront could not be viewed.
By the ninth update on Thursday morning, Steam, Sony Entertainment Network and Xbox Live were back to normal levels of performance. Nintendo's network is still down, a problem that's reportedly related to the eShop.
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Destructoid reports that over in Japan, Nintendo was forced to remove the just-launched Pokemon bank due to the current problems with the network. The app provides a free Celebis and allows customers to store their Pokemon from the "X" and "Y" versions in the cloud. The app went live in Japan yesterday and was supposedly slated for a North American release on Friday.
Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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xPandaPanda I read the title and thought it was going to be about how online gaming, like MMOs, were getting a massive beat down by the advent of Christmas console gifts.Reply
Otherwise, decent article for what it was about. -
Freddy u Americans your funny the wiiu is selling way more than Xbox and the wii u will be champ because Asia says so.....Reply -
24oz Steam was down for A couple hours because they gave away Left 4 Dead 2 for free on Christmas day.besides that Steam has handling the traffic pretty well.Reply -
vpoko Reply
In the week leading up to Christmas, both the PS3 (401,000 units) and the Xbox 360 (407,000 units) outsold the Wii U (319,000 units), though. PS4 sold 656,000 units, and the Xbox One sold 307,000 units without being available in Japan or Europe yet. In any case, I hope they all sell well so that competition can drive quality up and prices down. It does seem that Nintendo aims at a slightly different market segment than Sony and Microsoft, but it's not like there's zero overlap.12325740 said:Americans your funny the wiiu is selling way more than Xbox and the wii u will be champ because Asia says so..... -
soldier44 Reply12325740 said:Americans your funny the wiiu is selling way more than Xbox and the wii u will be champ because Asia says so.....
Really like all of America buys the crapbox...PC gaming ftw there pal. The Wii u is not even in my vocabulary. Weak bs. -
Microsoft is quite lucky they didn't enforce their Always On DRM on Xbox One. I'm sure there would've been a lot of pissed customers, if they couldn't play during holidays of all times, just because their console has to be permanently connected to Xbox Live.Reply
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mapesdhs Can't help being slightly amused that while all this is going on with the "latest"Reply
technology, my gf & I once again happily do bash away on PS2 Champions of
Norrath with no such worries. :D "Console" gaming is not what it used to be,
no doubt about that. For up to date gaming, I'll stick with the PC platform, to
have the full modifiability that it offers.
Ian.
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mortonww Reply12327089 said:
In the week leading up to Christmas, both the PS3 (401,000 units) and the Xbox 360 (407,000 units) outsold the Wii U (319,000 units), though. PS4 sold 656,000 units, and the Xbox One sold 307,000 units without being available in Japan or Europe yet. In any case, I hope they all sell well so that competition can drive quality up and prices down. It does seem that Nintendo aims at a slightly different market segment than Sony and Microsoft, but it's not like there's zero overlap.12325740 said:Americans your funny the wiiu is selling way more than Xbox and the wii u will be champ because Asia says so.....
Xbox One has been available in Europe since day 1. PS4 launched there a week later. Neither of them are available in Japan yet, though.