PlayStation has finally publicly acknowledged that its PlayStation Stars rewards program has been down for nearly a month, although only with a short message about how it will be back online soon.
PlayStation Stars is the platform’s lesser-known loyalty program, where players can earn rewards and digital collectibles by buying games and completing campaigns via the mobile PS app. They will then earn points that can be spent on those collectibles, which they can display on their profile, or just redeem them for wallet funds or games and add-ons.
However, in June, reports starting coming out that users couldn’t access the service, and therefore couldn’t earn or redeem points. They took to Reddit to discuss their conversations with support agents, who gave a variety of answers about if they’ll receive points after the outage is fixed. Thankfully, it looks like players have earned points for purchases made during the downtime, according to an FAQ on the website, although there were Days of Play campaigns that won’t be accessible.
Members who visit the Stars page on Tuesday will see a message that says: “PlayStation Stars will be returning soon in phased regional rollouts. Thank you for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you back.” According to Forbes, Asia is first, with Europe and the Americas to follow.
The original message — the one users have seen since the beginning of June — just says “PlayStation Stars is not available at this time.” Otherwise, there hasn’t been any indication from Sony of what caused the outage.
As pointed out by PlayStation Lifestyle, this is the longest reported PlayStation outage since 2011, when PSN was unavailable after a major hack that exposed the personal information of millions of users. Another big difference with the Stars issue is that PlayStation has barely acknowledged it until now.
