It’s been a tense, nerve-racking week in the United States and the other countries who got the PlayStation Network restored after Sony’s online service was shut down by hackers. Like anyone burned by a bad break-up, PS3 owners were tentative: “Will it stay up? Will it leave us again? How can we be sure?”
Heck, some enterprising folks even made an app for that.
But, gamers in Japan and other Asian countries had it worse as PSN has still been down for them. In the PlayStation’s native country, the Japanese government blocked the restoration of service, citing dissatisfaction with Sony’s plans to plug up security holes.
Well, those concerns have apparently been addressed, as the Japanese PlayStation site has announced that PSN and Qriocity will be beginning restoration of service in Japan. Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand will all be getting those services, back, too.
Users in those parts will be getting the same mandatory password change security measure and similar welcome-back freebies that rolled out in the West. However, as in the U.S., there’s no word on when they’ll get the PlayStation Store back.
All that’s great, but the Great Game Hacking Summer of 2011 continues with the most recent hits happening at British publisher Codemasters and an Irish intrusion of Xbox Live that’s recently come to light. Hopefully, publishers will strengthen their security measures over the summer, because no one’s going to be happy with network outages when big, multiplayer-centric games like Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 come out later this year.