As of midnight (Central daylight time) of last night, the PlayStation Store is fully back online in the United States.
Sony’s digital distribution platform for PS3 and PSP was taken offline on April 19 of this year after hackers breached PlayStation Network security. Online play was restored in the US on May 14; Japan’s PSN remains down pending the Japanese government’s authorization. However, the PlayStation Store remained offline as Sony worked to improve security in an effort to restore confidence in PSN among consumers. Sony’s losses from the outage of its online services are estimated to be $171 million.
During the PlayStation Store’s downtime, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment temporarily suspended the “online pass” feature of the hugely popular Mortal Kombat, since the code is activated through the PlayStation Store. This allowed gamers to play MK without the pass during the downtime, since requiring an online pass would have disabled online play for those who bought the game new as well as used while the PS Store was offline.
The PlayStation Store’s relaunch comes with a wide plethora of new downloadable games, demos, DLC, and avatars. All of the updates made to the PlayStation Store at its relaunch are listed here on Sony’s official PlayStation blog.
At this time, Sony’s “Welcome Back” Package, which includes a choice of free PS3 and PSP games and 30 free days of PlayStation Plus for both current subscribers and non-subscribers, has not been made available. However, emails allowing PSN users to sign up for one free year of Debix’s AllClear identity protection service offered by Sony as part of its “Welcome Back” package have already been sent to PlayStation Network customers.