Sony is facing a class-action lawsuit in U.S. courts over something a lot of players already suspected: when you “buy” a digital game on the PlayStation Store, you don’t actually own it — you only hold a license to use it.
Official PlayStation logo, the Sony Interactive Entertainment brand.
The suit was filed by four consumers who claim the company never made this clear enough, allegedly violating a California law (AB 2426, from 2024) that requires plain-language disclosure that “purchasing” a digital product is, in practice, just licensing its use.
Sony’s defense
In its defense, Sony’s lawyers got straight to the point: “it is not plausible to claim reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining ‘ownership’ of a digital game.” The company even used a pretty specific argument to back up that claim.
- 11 days apart
that’s the gap between purchases of the same game Sony’s lawyers used as evidence.
Two of the plaintiffs bought the same game, Resident Evil Requiem, 11 days apart — which, according to Sony, proves that “ownership” was never a reasonable expectation, since no one would buy something again that they already truly own.
Sony’s own marketing contradicts its defense
Here’s the funny part: PlayStation’s own website and marketing use phrases like “track your PS5 journey with info about the games you own” — meaning the company talks about “owning” games all the time when it’s trying to sell them.
- 30+ examples
catalogued by the Consumer Rights Wiki of Sony telling users they own their games.
A Consumer Rights wiki has already gathered more than 30 similar examples of Sony telling its own customers that they do, in fact, own the digital games they paid for — quite the contradiction between the marketing pitch and the legal argument now being used to fight the lawsuit.
The case carries even more weight given that Sony has announced it will stop producing physical discs for PS5 starting in January 2028 — meaning more and more people will have to rely solely on the digital version, exactly the format the company now says can’t truly be “owned.”
For anyone who already suspected as much in practice — a library “disappearing” when a service shuts down, or a game pulled from a digital store even after you paid for it — this lawsuit just puts on paper something the gaming community has been debating for years: how much of your digital collection is really yours?
