Over the weekend, YouTuber Modded Hardware discovered a new expiration date for digital PlayStation games that suggested players would be locked out of their purchases without regular online checks. Confusion ensued, followed by shades of Xbox’s disastrously received digital DRM plans ahead of the launch of the Xbox One. Sony has finally stepped in with an official statement on the matter.
“Players can continue to access and play their purchased games as usual,” a spokesperson for the company told GameSpot in a new statement. “A one-time online check is required to confirm the game’s license, after which no further check-ins are required.”
As Kotaku previously reported, the fear was that players would need to routinely connect to the internet in order to continue accessing their digital games. Instead, it appears that new purchases now simply have a temporary license that needs to be authenticated at some point in order to convert it into a permanent license.
“The way we understand it currently is that there was an additional layer of DRM introduced to combat fraudulent behaviour from users,” DoesItPlay’s owner, Clemens Istel, told us. “Our best guess is that this might have to do with a refund scam we’ve heard about. It might also be about the recently reported exploit surrounding the Star Wars Racer game.”
Sony’s statement doesn’t address that speculation about why the change was implemented, and it certainly seems like it does introduce at least one additional layer of online checks that didn’t exist before. But it’s nowhere near the Trojan horse for a new era of aggressive DRM on PlayStation that some players had been worrying about.