Sony is not willing to say whether it is upgrading the service in any way

Aug 22, 2014 08:45 GMT  ·  By

The team at Sony in charge of the PlayStation Network announces that the service will be down for maintenance starting on Monday, 25 of August, at 17:40 British Standard Time and will be unavailable until 00:50 on Tuesday 26.

The official announcement explains that the following elements of the PSN will be down: PlayStation Store on all devices, PlayStation Network Account Management, PlayStation Network Account Registration, all entertainment services, and online gameplay for all titles.

Gamers will also be unable to connect to the PlayStation Network from the European version of the official site.

Sony adds, “During this maintenance, you can continue to collect in-game trophies and these will be updated on your profile once PlayStation Network is back up and running.”

All gamers who have questions about the maintenance period can ask them on the official forums, and the company says that it will continue to offer updates on the status of the PSN and whether the downtime will need to be extended for any reason.

As usual, the company is not willing to actually tell users what changes it is planning to make or whether this is just a normal period during which it will optimize the service for future use.

A little more transparency would be welcomed on the part of Sony, especially given how much trouble the PlayStation Network caused when it was hacked, with consequences still playing out for both the company and its customers.

At the moment, the biggest thing that could justify infrastructure changes is the launch of the PlayStation Now service, designed to allow players to simply stream a variety of games to their home consoles and other devices, like television sets.

The streaming tech acquired from Gaikai is complex and might need extensive changes on Sony’s part in order to work properly.

The service could have an important long-term impact on how we experience games and how we pay for them, and the company needs to make sure that at launch the quality is the best it can be.

At the same time, Sony is getting ready to introduce a new major 2.0 firmware update for the PlayStation 4, which is designed to finally allow players to simply jump into a title that a friend is playing in order to help them out.

Sony also promises more media support and better sharing options for the home console that has managed to get past the 10 million unit sales milestone.