Just in time for them to take physical discs away!
I’ve been a hardcore PlayStation guy since I was about 9 when I got my first console the PS1.
Crash team racing is better than Mario Kart 64
Spyro the Dragon is the best 3D platformer of the late 90s.
I’ve had a PS2… That still works 22 years later.
I was in the great wars of PS2 vs XBOX.
I like Halo 1 and 2, I like Killzone 1, 2 and 3.
I was there at the beginning.
I was there when Sony moved their PlayStation HQ from Japan to America.
I was there when the quality of good JRPGs and adventure games plummeted so we could be fed a new call of duty and FIFA every year.
These days I’m PC, PS5 and switch. I will not be buying a PS6 or a Switch 2.
It should be mentioned that… I’d rather throw myself down a cliff than buy an Xbox.
The formatting of my message got ruined… I had to use two returns or it all ended up in a giant wall of text…
(For people under 30, Return is what the Enter key is called… I don’t know what it’s called on phones… the icon on your phone that is going down and has an arrow pointing left).
‘Return’ is a typewriter holdover for new line + carriage return, since a new line just went down without returning all the way to the start. The arrow to the right means its a ‘return’ key ;) Just turned 33 too
Seeing how shit they are at securing their customers accounts, it might actually be a good thing
Note that technically the agreement says that Sony reserves the right to delete the account after 36 months, not that they’ll actually do it. It might “just” be a stupid bit of legalese to cover Sony’s ass in case they’re required to delete older data.
Of course the idea is worrying nonetheless.
note my myself: whenever entering a contract with u/ChairmanMeow@programming.dev just tell him those terms that are not in his favor are just legalese for some edge case and I certainly will voluntarily not make any use of those terms that are totally in my favor and they should not worry.
if they can delete someones account and potentially make them buy everything again (at least that is how i think the executives must view it) why wouldnt they?
So sign into your PS account on their website or your old console once every three years? If it’s something you care about that’s really not a big ask.
this is a horrible take. if you buy something, it should stay yours even if you don’t look at it for 20 years. If Sony opts for not selling CDs any more (asshole move) they should at least carry to burden of storing a few kB per customer. Forever.
Seems illegal.
All in on live services.
ill be sure to tell my siblings to sign into my account every 3 years. gee thanks sony. whats the fucking point of this
Preventing the recovery of temporarily abandoned accounts (like from a family member that stopped gaming some time ago), and saving a few cents in storage.
*millicents
Is it time for me to try to mod my ps4 so I can keep all my games? Does ps4 support soft modding yet? Cause I can’t solder…
Depends what firmware you’re on. If you’ve updated in the last year or so, you’re fucked, otherwise there’s a variety of options
This should explain every step
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn7ji3VsPy3FRxLrjz5ScpvpTirAxQ3me
There are doing a speed run no one wants.
This is for UK and EU due to GDPR that requires companies delete all user data for inactive accounts. It’s a unintended consequences of the law and other gaming companies including Xbox have similar clauses.
The law says they can’t keep your PII after you stop being a customer, not anything about linking your email address to purchases for an entirely legitimate ongoing reason.
The law covers personal data not PII and is much broader than PII that is defined under the US Office of Privacy and Open Government which has no bearing on the GDPR.
As for personal data, email addresses are covered and even user names could be considered personal data depending on if it’s linkable to a person and since your account is linked to your email and linked to you user name potentially, when they have to delete personal data the have to delete all of those foreign keys in their database that says your email once got a receipt for that game you bought digitally.
They need to retain financial data for way longer though, and are basically allowed to store their bookkeeping stuff for forever. So they could restore accounts from that anyways. I’d argue, they could keep the account details which can be recovered from financial data under those circumstances. Which probably would be everything necessary to keep the purchased games. They’d need to delete e.g. usage data, connection data etc.
Except they don’t have to delete any of that as long as you hold ongoing software licenses with them, as that’s a legitimate interest. This is malicious compliance posing as “well they made us do it”, same as all the GDPR banners on the web.
I’m not here to defend the corporations.
Email addresses are PII under GDPR, aren’t they? So linking email addresses to purchase history is explicitly retaining PII and data about someone they can identify.
You are explicitly allowed to retain PII for critical business purposes. So in this case as a key component that the software licence is attached to they can retain it forever anyway.
Pretty sure that the gdpr specifically precludes forever retention. Data should be retained as long as is necessary and whether 1, 3, 5, 10 or however many years, sooner or later deletion is appropriate, and the timeline depends on what is reasonable.
3 years is a long time to not log in and if a court decided that it exceeded a ‘reasonable’ period for legitimate interest the fines can go to 10% of global revenue. The law encourages risk averse behaviour.
They could make a better system where the user sets the timeline but it would be impossible to predict the return.
On this one i think its probably driven by risk management not nefarious intent.
3 years is not long at all if you factor having kids into the equation. There is not a lot, if any, time to play video games when your kids are small. Imagine having 2 kids 1-2 years apart and not finding time for gaming (on your PS) until the youngest is at least 2 years old - then you are quickly looking at 3-4 years without login.
3 years is not a long time at all. I’ve been collecting games on my steam account for 19 years, and there was a period of >2 years where I didn’t use it.
how is that even legal?
we need better consumer protection for digital purchases.
It’s literally because of consumer protection laws. GDPR requires the deletion of unused data, to ensure companies aren’t just holding onto your data indefinitely. This is simply the consequence of that, because Sony has apparently determined that three years is enough of a threshold to be considered “unused”.
GDPR only requires that, if there is no legitimate use for keeping the data. Ongoing software license is a legitimate use.
No, it’s not for GDPR compliance. It’s like this talking point “stupid data protection laws, all those cookie banners”. Nobody is forcing any company to use all those shitty tracking cookies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why lie about something like this?
Because it isn’t a lie. Companies need to justify why they are retaining personal information after they stop using it. If they can’t justify it, they need to delete it.
And you think Sony is going to put their neck on the line to try and argue that keeping old unused accounts open is a justifiable reason? They have literally zero incentive to do so, and a large profit incentive to delete accounts as soon as they can reasonably argue that they are too old. Because that will push people towards re-buying games they already purchased once before.
It absolutely is a lie.
It really reveals the nature of your purchase, doesn’t it? Apparently you are just buying some entries in a database. Sadly any software we can’t use offline can just be deleted like this. The pendulum swung too far towards the cloud, hopefully it comes back down to earth soon.
I logged into steam after like 15 years and it still worked.
It’s almost like Sony doesn’t want to have a PlayStation division anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
The whole tech industry is very overtly hell bent on pushing through an ai controlled dystopia.
What good would the current model of gaming be?
Have a bunch of people work very hard on a game and all that work “loses it’s value” after a year or so. (In their eyes, shit’s gotta sell).
When you can have ai just dream/hallucinate up a game and stream that instead? (It’s nowhere near that yet, but holy shit would they love it)
Now you have an endless stream of stuff to sell that costs you zero manpower.
Now the good peasants go work and can have half an hour of slop per day as a reward. And if they revolt, you just cut them off.
It’s odd timing given that microsoft seems to be giving up on Xbox
The Xbox people have a better grasp of things. Consoles have little reason to exist… and the writing was on the wall when the PS3 stumbled out the gate. Really, in the PS2 era, all those Renderware / id Tech 3 / Unreal 1 games running the same on every platform was a big hint that there was no longer a benefit to having different platforms. Now there’s just various badges over x86 PCs and smartphones - and the smartphones are starting to run Steam games.
None of which is to say that Microsoft has conducted their grand scheme to computer-ify the console market with any degree of finesse, consistency, or follow-through. They’re still idiots for setting successful studios on fire, and for refusing to shit or get off the pot vis-a-vis whether there’s gonna be an Xbox The Next One.
I’m guessing you weren’t around for the “arrogant sony” phase of late PS2/early PS3 where they thought/knew they could do whatever they want and they’d still be the kings of the market?
This is just a return to that (not specifically this though, since as others have pointed out it’s a direct result of GDPR etc laws). It’s because Xbox has basically been killed. Sony have no competition, so they don’t have to pretend to be a pro-consumer company anymore. They know they have an army of fans that will swallow up whatever they serve them, and they know that the people who don’t like it will end up buying it anyway since there’s no other option.
Nah, it’s because Sony knows that Xbox isn’t competition anymore.
Wow, say what you want about Microsoft but the worst I had to do with my Xbox Live was repatriate it from a Russian hacker.
