No hard deadline for the return of Sony's online service.
UPDATE: Sony has informed us that Bloomberg's wording, which was the foundation of this story, is inaccurate and the May 31 "deadline" does not exist. There does not appear to be any hard deadline established, only to return services as Sony determines the appropriate security measures are in place.
Venture Beat first broke the dispute, which we separately confirmed with Sony. It's suspected the confusion may have come from this line in the recent press conference: "We are aiming to restore full services including PlayStation Store and purchasing features for Qriocity services within May 2011."
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Hey, remember last week, when Sony said that it planned to get the ball rolling with restoring its PlayStation Network services starting last week? Right, just a quick reminder that it's not last week anymore. It's this week now. So, to be clear, last week came and went, and now this is this week, and yes your PSN services still aren't up. I know, I was confused, too. Just trust me on this one.
So, uh... how's that SOCOM single-player, eh? Now, on the subject of the PSN and when-ish you might actually be able to get back online, the answer currently is: "Dunno?"
As of this morning, Sony does not have a firm timetable for getting PSN all the way back online, and is currently only stating that everything should be restored by the end of this month. This info comes from company spokesman Shigenori Yoshida, who told Bloomberg this morning that the company is currently uncertain exactly when everything will return to a live state, and that Sony has set a deadline of May 31 for all services to be restored.
Last week's plan to restore partial services fell by the wayside when Sony decided it needed to finalize testing to make sure its newly constructed system was operating correctly. So, until we get another projected time line from Sony, all we can do is sit, wait, and wonder which other version of Splash Damage's multiplayer shooter, Brink, to pick up tomorrow.
