In a recent statement from a court filling, Sony has argued that digital versions of games simply cannot be owned cause they can be bought by multiple customers from the online stores. The official statement by Sony comes from an August 21 court filing which was a response to a class-action lawsuit that had claimed earlier that the company’s digital store failed to comply with California’s 2025 Digital Goods Law.
Here’s the full statement from the filling (via GameFile) where Sony argues against Digital ownership of games:
“As Plaintiffs admit, Section 1 of the SPLA likewise explains that “The Software is licensed to you, not sold.” This makes sense. In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining ‘ownership’ of a digital game. Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026, for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr. Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then.”
It’s already widely known at this point that when we buy a digital version of a videogame, what we actually pay for is the license to access it instead of getting full ownership. And with Sony confirmed to end all production of discs from 2028, this puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea of owning your games. However, the company has confirmed to support all of the currently available physical games beyond that point, stating that publishers can still get existing physical media printed after January 2028.
One of the problems of the complete loss of physical media is that it’ll give players far less control over their owned videogames and can essentially remove all sense of ownership and rights which in turn leaves all of that in the hands of the publishers. This also takes away all sense of freedom of playing that gamers have towards their owned copies which is damning in more ways than one, making the industry move one step closer to a centralized, authoritarian model where huge corporations have all the control while the players have almost none.
