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PlayStation has given itself the ability to terminate your PS5 account and remove access to all of your PS5 games. It can also do this with your PS5 Pro and PS4, and it will be able to do this with your PS6 as well. Where Sony has been making some controversial decisions on its own, lately, this change appears to be driven by regulation out of the European Union, which is driving a ton of regulation of the video game industry this generation.
Back in April, PlayStation quietly updated its Terms of Service, which anyone seldom reads. As a result, it flew under the radar until now. In the wake of all the recent PlayStation controversy involving discs, people are digging up anything and everything they can find to fire at Sony’s way. This is when the aforementioned update was revealed, and another PR crisis for PlayStation was born.
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If a PlayStation account goes inactive for 36 months — three years — Sony has the ability to begin closing the account, which consists of it contacting the owner via email and letting them know they have six months to sign in or request the account be kept open, or it will be closed. This will prevent the user from accessing PSN, and all digital purchases made with the account will become inaccessible. Best yet, the termination is irreversible.
It’s worth noting that the language used is not definitive. It says that Sony “may” start this process if the inactivity threshold is triggered. To this end, this could be more appeasing to regulators than anything else and may not be common. Unfortunately, we do not know.
Of course, this is not going to impact a majority of PlayStation fans, but it’s going to impact some. People fall in and out of gaming, or sometimes circumstances in life take the hobby away from people on a temporary basis. The option to request the account stay active after receiving the aforementioned email is a good option for consumers, but there are going to be accounts that don’t know about any of this that go inactive and miss this email, and one day they will return, and they may find their account and all of their digital games permanently gone. And that’s going to be a very, very bad day for that PlayStation user.
Sony has not commented on this developing controversy, and for various reasons, we do not expect it to, nor do we expect it to walk this back. As noted, this is not purely the result of its own ideation, but the result of pressure from regulators.
All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think, or join the video game conversations happening over on the Forum.
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