from the poof-it's-gone dept
In all of our discussions about how the digital revolution has created a system in which people don’t actually own the things they think they’re buying, I get particularly frustrated by the lack of change in it all. We’ve spilled much ink complaining that this clearly anti-consumer practice needs to be done away with, where an unsuspecting public thinks they’re buying “a thing” only to learn months or years later that “the thing” they bought was actually a license to use/view/listen to another “thing”, and that license exists at the pleasure of the company that collected the money for it. And if you want to see the lack of change or action really honed in upon, let’s take a look at Sony’s PlayStation Store.
In 2022, due to “evolving licensing agreements” with distributor StudioCanal, German and Austrian users had hundreds of movies disappear from their PS accounts, long after buying them through Sony. Then in 2023, it happened again in America, specifically when Sony ended its licensing agreement with Discovery after the Warner Bros. merger, which, of course, has since been bought by Paramount Skydance. That resulted in customers having hundreds and hundreds of episodes of TV shows deleted from their accounts. Nowhere in any of this were there refunds, of course. No recompense at all, actually. Just a thing you thought you’d bought taken away from you by the very people you thought you bought it from.
And now it’s happening again. Due to another licensing agreement fallout with StudioCanal, hundreds of movies and TV shows are being ripped from the accounts of PS Store customers, and there appears to be fuck all that they can do about it.
This news was brought to people’s attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, “Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.” The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people’s libraries.
As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it’s perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period… but I can promise you that the public in general doesn’t understand that. They think they’re buying a thing, not a license.
And that’s because of the purposeful obfuscation of that fact. Sony damned well knows that the vast majority of people don’t read those Ts and Cs. It knows that the public largely doesn’t understand how these backend licensing agreements with distributors work, or that they even exist. And Sony isn’t exactly putting out a big blinking sign on its store pages informing the public of all of this. Instead, the company is only too happy to collect money from a public that is being purposefully kept ignorant of what they’re buying.
Of course, when you scroll past the endless EULAs when you first use your PlayStation, and click “Agree” the first time you load the store, you’re unwittingly agreeing that nothing you buy is really truly bought, and that it can be taken away from you at any point, and there’s nothing you can do. The same is true of your games.
This, too, will probably pass without any real action. The government has done its best to gut our consumer protection agencies, so they won’t be any help. Angry customers won’t coalesce into activism or action, most likely. And I’ll probably be writing another one of these posts in a couple of years when it all happens again.
But it shouldn’t be that way. There are common sense things that can be done to better inform the public. Rules for how the store should inform people with each and every purchase. Someone just needs to demand it be done.
Filed Under: eula, ownership, playstation, playstation store, video games
Companies: sony, studiocanal