PlayStation wins "hall of shame" award from consumer rights group

Choice, an Australian consumer rights organization, has named Sony Interactive Entertainment as one of its annual "hall of shame" award winners. Alongside a vocal group of gamers, Choice is calling out PlayStation for failing to give players ownership rights to digital games, a problem that will be much worse with the impending end of physical games on the platform.

PlayStation wins "the Shonky Award for asking us to pay to play, but not own," Choice says in its write-up. According to Sony Interactive Entertainment, the organization argues, "you don’t actually own the movies and games that you buy as a digital download instead of a disc. Instead, you’re buying a license to access the content via Sony’s various digital storefronts, such as the PlayStation Store."

In effect, PlayStation is offering nothing more than long-term rentals for digital games, since it can simply revoke those licenses at any time. That fear will be intimately familiar to players who've been following campaigns like Stop Killing Games, and it's not an arbitrary concern – after all, as Choice notes, Sony did just delist several hundred digital films, revoking digital purchases with no refunds as they did so.

"You can't protect your licensed media based on the current EULA, and there won’t be any alternatives once the discs go away," Choice concludes. "You'll own nothing."

That lack of ownership may be a feature, not a bug, of PlayStation's planned end of physical media. The company still makes significant money on physical releases of its biggest games, but analysts argue that it's more interested in "control" of the market. No discs means no used games, which means Sony can take a cut of every transaction and set prices – alongside third-party publishers – without worrying about competition from secondhand markets.

Choice's Shonky Awards have been ongoing since 2006, and have sporadically included gaming companies in the annual hall of shame. In 2023, it named and shamed the Xbox Mini Fridge for failing to actually cool anything while drawing more power than a full-sized fridge. In 2013, when EA's always-online SimCity reboot launched to global server issues, Choice called out a problem particular to Australian players: the support line charged $2.48 per minute, "making people pay to complain."

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