New data has revealed that Xbox Live suffers outages much more often than PlayStation Network – and you’ll be surprised about what the data says about Steam.
Cloud gaming and shopping for digital copies of games have become the norm – accelerated by the pandemic, which has us all shopping online much more. Nothing is more annoying than logging on via your Xbox or PlayStation and finding the online store is down.
In the battle of the consoles, tapping into the online game stores is a key weapon. But how does Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold stack up against PS Plus and PS Now? The data is in.
Which store goes down more?
As reported by Screen Rant, ToolTester has been tracking the performance of the online stores.
The two Microsoft stores for Xbox experienced a total of 63 disruptions to services. The PlayStation equivalents clocked up only 49 incidents. However, in a blow to PC players, both stores performed better than Steam – which recorded a massive 99 outages over the same period.
If you’re looking for a reason to choose PlayStation over Xbox, this new data on online store performance might just tip you towards a PS. However, this shows how the move to cloud gaming is causing challenges to the industry as a whole.
The whole idea of the ‘cloud’ makes technology appear as if it’s just floating, uncoupled from the physical world and it’s messy cables and physical components. This isn’t the case. The internet remains a dirty, physical beast that requires real-world infrastructure to power it.
We’re changing the way we work, study and play – and it’s straining the systems we currently have in place. We just wrote about the chip shortages caused by the pandemic and our behaviour changes. The future of gaming is surely in moving more online. But careful investment is needed to get there.
What do you think about your online gaming store? Which do you swear by? Let us know via our social media channels.
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Featured Image Credit: Sony