PlayStation Stars blackout spoils Sony’s latest crossover campaign

It’s been nearly four weeks since subscribers could access their PlayStation Stars campaigns — the loyalty scheme has been offline since early June 2024. That’s bad news for anyone looking to spend their PS Stars points, but it’s also bad news for Sony, as a major PlayStation Stars Ghostbusters campaign to promote the latest movie has gone unseen.

PlayStation Stars outage ruins Ghostbusters Frozen Empire crossover

If you didn’t know, Sony uses PlayStation Stars for more than just rewarding PS5 and PS4 users for their PS Store purchases. The company has also used the platform for promoting the brands of its partners and various internal Sony projects.

For example, we’ve seen Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 PlayStation Stars collectibles promoting the likes of Adidas and Wheaties cereal. Similarly, we’ve seen the platform promote Sony Picture’s efforts previously with a PlayStation Stars campaign advertising the movie Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse back in September 2023.

The same should have happened with the PlayStation Stars campaign “Ghostbusters Frozen Empire Comes Home,” which was set to launch on Tuesday, June 18, 2024. Here, we would have seen the PlayStation brand collaborating with Sony Pictures to help promote one of its latest movies, Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. However, since PlayStation Stars went offline on Wednesday, June 5, 2024, this crossover campaign went completely unseen.

While we did notice that PlayStation Stars users have been able to claim an offline campaign reward for this Ghostbusters campaign, we can presume that’s not exactly the result Sony Pictures had in mind with this crossover. The Ghostbusters campaign appears to still be active in the backend of the PS App right now, it just can’t be seen by any users.

I think it provides a fascinating insight into the PlayStation Stars outage for two reasons. Firstly, it helps put to bed any PlayStation Stars conspiracies that suggest Sony intentionally took the service offline. This kind of arrangement with Sony Pictures would definitely have ruled out any planned outage like this. So, it seems like the PlayStation Stars blackout is entirely down to either an error or potentially a malicious attack.

The second reason is because it suggests there might be an incentive here driving Sony to fix PlayStation Stars. While disgruntled subscribers should be plenty of incentive, I’m sure the prospect of spoiling deals with internal and external Sony partners is far more of a motivator for PlayStation’s decision-makers.

With Sony Picture’s Ghostbusters campaign going completely unnoticed, you have to imagine someone at the studio is frustrated with how the PlayStation division is handling the blackout. Moreover, the risk of this happening with a third-party partner deal would definitely cause some headaches for PlayStation — particularly if money changes hands.

So, with these potential issues floating over Sony’s head, you have to imagine PlayStation Stars won’t be offline for much longer. If the loyalty scheme does remain offline and you’re worried about your points expiring, you can use our PlayStation Stars guide to work out if there’s any cause for concern. In the meantime, let us know in the comments what your thoughts are on this spoiled Ghostbusters PS Stars campaign.