Sony hit with $2.67 billion lawsuit over ‘excessive and unfair’ digital download charges

A tribunal in the United Kingdom is hearing a class-action lawsuit against Sony for “monopolising” digital game sales via its PlayStation Store, the BBC has reported. First filed in 2022 by consumer rights advocate Alex Neill, the lawsuit argues that PlayStation owners have faced “excessive and unfair” charges via Sony’s “closed eco-system.” As it stands now, the only storefront available on PlayStation consoles is Sony’s.

“The result is that Sony can and does set the retail prices of all such content itself without facing any retail competition for digital content,” the lawsuit’s representative, Robert Palmer KC, said. “It allows it to obtain monopoly profits from digital distribution, setting retail prices at what it refers to as its target margin of an excessive and unfair 30% above the level of the digital wholesale prices.”

The lawsuit is seeking £2 billion ($2.67 billion) on behalf of an estimated 12.2 million users, which would equate to £162 (about $216) per person. UK PlayStation users who have purchased a game from the PlayStation Store over roughly the past decade are eligible.

Sony argued that adding third-party storefronts would pose a security risk, but did not specify how. It also argued that the sale of digital games helps to subsidize low-margin hardware sales. The current generation of consoles has certainly prioritized a digital-focused approach. The launch version of the PlayStation 5 came in two models, one with a disc drive and one without. When the PlayStation 5 Pro launched a few years later, it was exclusively digital-only. (An external disc drive can be purchased separately.) It’s not known how many of the 92 million PS5s Sony has shipped are digital-only, but the sales of physical games have been steadily falling for years.

The BBC noted the tribunal is expected to take about 10 weeks. Whatever the decision is, Sony’s peers at Xbox and Nintendo will surely be paying attention, as their platforms aren’t too dissimilar from Sony’s. The only place to buy a digital game on a Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 console is at Nintendo’s eShop, for example.

This isn’t the only time Sony has been sued over digital sales. A similar class-action lawsuit was filed in The Netherlands last year, arguing Sony had been “abusing its dominant position in the console market for at least a decade,” according to a press release (via Eurogamer). Valve has also faced similar legal action over its digital storefront, Steam. If these lawsuits are successful, we could see drastic changes to the way digital games are sold not just on PlayStations, but across consoles.

Video game companies aren’t the only ones who’ve been challenged over their digital storefronts. The European Union has now made it so iPhone users can legally download apps from third-party marketplaces outside of Apple’s official App Store.