As part of an ongoing lawsuit against Sony, the company’s lawyers recently claimed “reasonable” consumers understand that when they buy a digital game on PlayStation, they don’t actually own it. So it doesn’t need to better disclose this fact on its store page. However, people have been documenting all the times PlayStation has told players that they do indeed own their games, which seems to add some confusion to the company’s defense.
Last week, as reported by Game File, Sony lawyers filed a response to a class action lawsuit filed by gamers in California who believe Sony isn’t doing enough, as legally required in the state, to make it clear that when buying a game on PS5 you don’t actually own the game. Instead, you are just purchasing a revocable, limited license to access the digital product according to PlayStation’s lengthy terms of service. You know, the things most people don’t read and which are written for lawyers and not your average person. That might be true, legally speaking, but as pointed out in the lawsuit, Sony’s PSN Store uses “Purchase” and “Owned” quite a lot, which the suit argues is confusing and misleading.
To further hammer home just how frequently PlayStation uses terms like “owned” when referring to digital products players have purchased, people have started cataloging examples of the company telling players a DLC requires them to “own” a game or that they can upgrade a game they “already own” for free. It’s a big list. Here are just a few:
- The minute you boot up, you’ll see all the information about games you own, what your friends are doing, whether there’s any new DLC coming out…”
- Track your PS5 journey with info on your total play time, games you own and more.
- If you already own the PS4® version, you do not need to buy the PS5® version of this game.
- Every review comes from a verified owner of this game or item and is evaluated by a team of moderators.
There are many, many, many more examples of Sony just casually using similar terms across its websites, emails, and PSN Store. And as far as I can tell, few, if any, of these examples have an asterisk leading to a small note explaining that what you actually own is a license and not the game.
While it is true that deep down in the terms of service it is explained what you actually get when you purchase a digital game on PlayStation, I think it is wild that Sony is trying to argue that in the current “digital age” we find ourselves in that no “reasonable consumer believed they were obtaining ‘ownership’ of a digital game.”
Maybe most of the people reading these words on Kotaku understand that concept, even if they don’t like it. But it seems completely silly to suggest that a random 13-year-old kid or a parent who does a bit of gaming on the weekend will understand that “buying” a game and being told you “own it” by the company that sold it to you doesn’t actually mean what those words have meant for most of modern human history.
As the company moves toward an all-digital future, questions about ownership and preservation will only become more important. I suspect this isn’t the last time Sony will find itself in court trying to explain how buying a game doesn’t really mean you own it.
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