Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz
I am the Director of Entitlement Lifecycle at PlayStation.
You have purchased 412 games. You own none of them. And after 36 months of silence, I am required, by a law written to protect you, to delete every one.
Let me show you how that sentence is true.
When you clicked Buy, a word you chose, you did not buy a game. You bought a license. The terms have always said so. "The software is licensed, not sold." It sits on the page you scrolled past to reach the button that says Buy. We did not hide it. We put it next to the price.
A license is revocable. That is what the word means. A thing you own cannot be taken; a thing you license can be ended. You did not buy the ability to play. You bought our permission to let you, and permission is a subscription with no monthly bill, which is the most beautiful kind, because you feel like an owner and pay like a tenant and thank us at the register.
Here is the part I am proud of.
I do not revoke your license for cause. I do not need a reason. I revoke it for silence. 36 months without signing in, and your account may be closed. May. The word does a great deal of work. It means I hold the right and you hold the anxiety, and anxiety is a form of engagement, and engagement is the only thing standing between your 412 games and 0.
We email you first. You get 6 months. A warning shot at an address you last used in 2019 and have not opened since. If you see it, sign in, and the timer resets, and you have proven you still exist to a system that was about to decide you did not.
And now the sentence I like best.
The reason I am allowed to do this is a privacy law. A European law, written to protect you, that says a company must not keep the data of people who have gone quiet. Your games are data. Deleting data is compliance. So the law that exists to shield you from us is the law that lets us take back what you paid for, and we never have to argue with it, because we are on the same side. We are both protecting you.
There is no refund. There was never a purchase. You cannot be refunded for a license you were always renting, and the receipt that says Purchased is not a lie. It is a definition. That is what Buy means here. It always did.
The discs are ending. No shelves by 2028. Soon there is only the license, only the account, only the timer.
So sign in. Prove you still exist.
Or the library will prove you never owned it.