Back in June, some gamers sued Sony over how games are purchased on its digital storefront, claiming the company violated a California law requiring stores to make clear that digital purchases are a license. Sony replied earlier in August, as it attempts to move the suit into arbitration instead of going to court. Among its arguments, Sony suggests that the plaintiffs don’t understand how ownership works, and in fact no one can really own anything at all.
As spotted by Game File, Sony’s August 21 response to plaintiffs Andrew Garcia, Edward Heycock, Jason Mendoza, and John Salinas is a little bit hypothetical: It’s the argument the company would make if the case were to go to court instead of the arbitration Sony argues the plaintiffs agreed to in the PlayStation store’s terms of service. “If, however, the Court were to address the merits of the dispute, the Court should dismiss the claims with prejudice,” Sony writes in its filing.
Sony argues that its purchase page and terms of service make clear that a PlayStation store purchase doesn’t confer ownership. It also argues that the plaintiffs aren’t alleging any harm, given that the “are, by their own allegations, very satisfied customers, who have ‘spent hundreds of dollars’ on PlayStation digital goods over the past few years, repeatedly buying video games.”
Then comes a section of the filing titled “Reasonable Consumers Would Not Be Misled,” in which Sony drops this banger:
In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining “ownership” of a digital game. Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr. Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then… Moreover, digital video games are played against other players, who themselves must have a copy of the game in order to play. It is not plausible that reasonable consumers would believe that once they obtained a digital video game, they would be the exclusive owner of that game.
This is a simply bonkers argument. I don’t think anyone buying a car thinks they’re buying the only car in the world, nor does someone buying Resident Evil Requiem think clicking the “confirm purchase” button means there’s only one Resident Evil Requiem in existence and they snagged it. Owning something doesn’t get its meaning from ensuring no one else owns it. In the world of digital purchases, this was an idea that undergirded the NFT craze, in which regular people fired back by simply copy-pasting ugly apes of their own; while everyone agreed this made the original ape (even more) worthless, it didn’t mean that first idiot didn’t still own an ape. Sony’s philosophical “reasonable consumer” here comes off seeming anything but reasonable, someone who hasn’t yet learned that the kindergarten classroom has more than one red beanbag chair at storytime.
— Mike Bithell (@mikebithell.bsky.social) September 1, 2026 at 11:53 AM
That some lawyers got together in a room and dreamed this one up is blowing my mind. Sony has plenty of other arguments to stand on (and makes them in its filing) without resorting to some bizarre conflation of ownership as being dependent on exclusivity. The problem the plaintiffs are complaining about isn’t that other people also own the same video game as them, it’s the fear that Sony could take the video game away by revoking the license or ending support for a game’s servers.
The lawsuit against Sony is one of several cases against games sellers winding through the courts over the idea of digital ownership, and part of a broader movement concerned with what “ownership” means in a world of increasingly digital goods–and, in Sony’s case, soon-to-be exclusively digital goods, with the company ending its production of physical discs in 2028. Whether or not the plaintiffs' arguments are good is up to the court to decide, but Sony replying that “hey man, no one owns anything” like a college kid taking a bong hit is a wild thing to see in a court document.
Nicole Carpenter
