Back in 2018, Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC decided to no longer serve codes for digital games for sale at any retail locations. Instead, users who want to buy any digital title can only do so on PlayStation Store which is a digital store from Sony. This sparked a lot of anger among consumers as they could no longer buy digital games from any retail store. Apparently, a class-action lawsuit has been filed at the U.S. District Court in Northern District of California titled Caccuri v. Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC where the former has filed charges after the latter that consumers end up paying more for digital games than their physical counterparts.
Sony charges a whopping sum on digital games
For the uninitiated, Sony stopped giving codes for digital games at retail stores. Although they can still sell physical CDs of the games, digital games are no longer available. The only place that offers the titles i.e. the PlayStation Store charges a whooping up to 175 percent more on these games compared to the physical games.
According to the filing, Sony is acting as a monopoly charging supracompetitive prices for the digital games which are way higher than the titles sold in their physical counterparts.
Usually, a retail outlet would offer discounts on digital games and since there are many outlets, consumers could end up paying a lot less than the previous outlet they visited. However, now that the PlayStation Store has a monopoly over digital games, consumers can no longer get it from any other outlets, and thus, they end up paying exactly what Sony is charging and that just goes around showing how monopolistic Sony can be.
Note that Sony still offers discounts and deals on its digital games but charging up to 175 percent of its physical counterpart is still on the table. PlayStation consoles with physical drives can still prove instrumental as consumers can simply buy a physical DVD. However, with consoles like Digital-only PlayStation 5 where you can only have digital titles, this monopolistic behavior becomes a problem.
It remains to be seen how does the lawsuit fans out and who has a stronger case than others.
