Sony says you do not own your PlayStation games

Sony says it in plain English, in a sentence that opens with the word purchase. There is no defined term doing quiet work here and no lawyer's hedge. You bought a licence, and you do not own the thing.

This is the one. Sony's storefront says Buy Now. Sony's contract says that the word "buy" there carries no meaning. The button and the agreement describe two different transactions, and Sony has written down which of them is real.

We quote the clause whole because its famous sentence is the second half of it. The first half tells you who owns everything, and it is not you.

The heading says Purchased Items. The clause says the product can be removed, that your licence can expire, that either one is your problem, and that Sony owes you no replacement copy for any reason. Those two things are in the same section of the same document.

Read the last sentence twice, because Sony draws the ownership line itself and puts it in writing. The discs keep working, because a disc is a thing you own. Everything you "purchased" digitally stops, because it never was.

Directly under this clause, in capitals, Sony adds that termination "FOR ANY REASON" earns you no refund for subscriptions, virtual items, pre-paid products, or the money still sitting in your wallet. That capitalised sentence carries one real exception: "except as required by law".

This answers the question the storefront never raises: how long does a purchase last? For anything that touches a server, the answer is for as long as Sony feels like it, with no notice and no liability.

This is the licence over the games themselves, and it is worth knowing how you get to it. The PS5 console agreement points at a URL, us.playstation.com/softwarelicense, which redirects three times before landing here. Its opening line covers "any game software application ... for any format", first party and third party, disc and download.

Before the licence grant, before the restrictions, before anything else: the console you own outright will only ever run software you do not.

A 14 day refund window that closes the instant you do the thing you bought it for. Further down the same page Sony concedes the trap can spring without you touching anything: "downloads will happen automatically if Automatic Downloads are enabled in your system settings", which is the console's default.

In fairness, this page is also where Sony looks best: physical purchases get a real 30 day return window. The harsher terms are specific to digital delivery, which is rather the point.