The $7.9 Billion Lawsuit Against Sony For PlayStation Store Prices Doesn’t Make Sense

While it makes for a flashy headline, I am left scratching my head attempting to figure out what a very pricey lawsuit against Sony for PlayStation Store prices is actually trying to prove.

Last year, Sony was sued “on behalf” on 9 million people in the UK who bought games in the PlayStation store. A consumer advocate named Alex Neill has brought the cast against Sony which amounts to $7.9 billion those customers are reportedly owed.

The claim echoes something we’ve recently heard from Epic in its fight against Apple and Google’s app stores which take a 30% cut and don’t allow other storefronts on their platform. Here, close to the same thing is being said. Sony takes a 30% cut, which is charged to developers and publishers, with the claim that customers have paid higher prices as a result.

Sony, for its part, has said that the lawsuit is “flawed from start to finish.” But the new development is that the case is not being thrown out, and Sony must indeed face the lawsuit.

Last year, Alex Neill did a reddit AMA where all the extremely obvious flaws with this case were pointed out, resulting in non-stop roasting and few replies from Neill themselves.

First, there really is not evidence that the 30% cut Sony is taking is a harm to consumers, given that the cost is passed to developers and publishers. If Sony games were say, 30% more expensive than competitors perhaps this would make sense, but price parity across the industry including with rivals like Xbox shows this isn’t the case. You could view this as a wider industry problem, but it’s Sony specifically being singled out here. And something like anti-competitive laws would not seem to have to do with dictating what kind of cut Sony can take from publishers. Also, it’s ultimately the publishers who set the price points for their games, hence why some games are still $60 and others are now $70. Sony is not mandating those prices.

We have also already seen precedent for this as Epic was unable to get a ruling against Apple and its own 30% cut in the app store. And the state of the industry is that every company except Epic charges that 30% cut. And Epic, with that lower cut, often has similar or identical pricing to its rivals, the cut being mainly an attractive point for publishers (this has had mixed results, with the Epic Games Store still not profitable after many years).

Sony losing a $7.9 billion lawsuit would be a big deal. That’s twice what it paid for Bungie and more than what Microsoft paid for Bethesda. But looking at the meat of this case there…is no meat. It’s two slices of bread. Maybe one slice. Granted, the legal system and its understanding of the game industry can be unpredictable, and the lawsuit is going forward. But it does read as somewhat nonsensical in its current form.

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.