If, in Europe, it is the association of consumers Stichting Massaschade & Consument which filed on June 24, 2025 a collective complaint against Sony in the Bassers, across the Atlantic, the sling is carried out by a group of consumers bound by a class action (a collective appeal). The case started in 2021, when consumers joined forces to target Sony accusing the firm of having established an illegal monopoly on the sale of dematerialized games. This collective recourse incriminates the policy established by Sony from April 2019, when the manufacturer prohibited its partners (Best Buy, Amazon, Gamesop, etc.) to sell download codes for PlayStation Games. Result: users have had no choice but to go through the PlayStation Store, thus depriving the market of any form of price competition until December 2023, end of the period covered by the complaint. An amicable regulations of $ 7.8 million had been proposed, but American justice has just blocked adoption.
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In a decision rendered on July 17, 2025 (which you can consult here), the Federal Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín refused to approve the negotiated agreement negotiated between Sony and the complainants, considering that it was “neither fair, reasonable, nor adequate” in view of the damaged damage. The company proposed a regulation of $ 7.8 million in the form of electronic credits to be distributed between the 4.4 million players concerned, an average amount of $ 1.77 per person. The judge also criticized the lack of transparency concerning the claim procedures and the methods of distributing credits. She said she was concerned about the extent of the legal fees claimed by the lawyers of the complainants (almost $ 2.6 million), with regard to an agreement that only benefits consumers.
This refusal of validation does not end the file, but obliges the parties to review their copy, or even to initiate a trial. And he could have wider repercussions. If the living room consoles, whether PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Switch historically operate on locked ecosystems, the regulation of these models raises increasing issues as the share of the dematerialized is essential. According to the most recent data provided by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the total expenditure of American consumers in terms of video games in 2024 amounts to around 59 billion dollars, including 50.6 billion devoted to dematerialized content (digital games, downloadable contained, microtransactions, subscriptions on all platforms), or about 86 % of the expenses in digital form. With such a proportion, it is obvious that the publishers want to take full advantage of this financial windfall. In this context, the rejection of the regulation by judge Martínez-Olguín is surely a legal event scrutinized closely by all actors in the sector.
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