You’ve probably seen over the weekend signs of a worrying development for people who buy digital games on PlayStation. But in case you missed it, some gamers have reported seeing a new 30-day online check-in requirement for some of these digital games. This is reminiscent of some fringe situations that can arise with free games claimed via PS Plus. But now it’s happening to games that people have bought, rather than claimed for free.
Since then, some of the affected gamers have shared that the PlayStation Support bots have told them that this is a feature, and not a bug. The way it works is as simple as it sounds – whenever you’re online, the game checks in with servers to authenticate that you’ve actually bought them. Doing this grants you access to the game for 30 days. And before said 30 days are up you’ll have to repeat the process. The timer for this is not visible via the PS5 UI, but it is on the PS4.
This isn’t affecting all digital games though. From reports, it looks to be affecting digital games that were bought after a March firmware update. A user on X claims to have gone into the .RIF files of games and confirms that the previous End Timestamp offset date was set to not expire, while recent purchases were set to 30 days out.
Confusing matters further is the contradicting message provided by the human support agents. Another X user shared a response by a PlayStation support staffer that acknowledges the discussion on the matter going on. But the staffer said “at this time, there’s no requirement for players to re-authenticate their digital purchases every 30 days”. They add that “if anything ever changes with how the game access or authentication works, we’ll make sure players are informed through our official PlayStation channels”, of which there are none as of yet.
Deja Vu
As of which of these two hold water, it looks like the chatbots have one over the live support agents. Some gamers have somewhat tested this by removing the CMOS battery, breaking the digital license and console clock sync. When this is done, games affected by this simply fail to even boot up. This is reminiscent of an issue affecting the PS4 back in 2021, but was eventually fixed by another update.
All that being said, it’s still unclear if this is a repeat of that 2021 incident. Contradictory messaging between support bots and live agents notwithstanding, Sony officials have not made a definitive statement on the matter. So it remains to be seen which ends up actually being the truth of the matter.
(Source: @NikTeK, @manfightdragon, @desgamesyt, @egycnq, @MichaelShourd)
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