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Sony settles its PlayStation Store antitrust case at about $1.34 of credit per account
A judge in San Francisco will decide whether roughly $5.89 million in PlayStation Store credit, spread over 4,407,533 accounts, closes the Sherman Act case over Sony's 2019 decision to stop supplying retail download codes.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Sony will deposit PlayStation Store credit straight into eligible US PlayStation Network accounts to satisfy a $7.85 million antitrust settlement, with no claim form for buyers of qualifying digital games.
- The settlement administrator has identified 4,407,533 eligible accounts, and each account's credit is prorated against the qualifying purchases made by everyone else in the pool.
- A purchase counts only if the title had a retail download voucher before April 1, 2019, the voucher was redeemed at least 200 times, and the price rose by at least 50 cents after Sony ended the codes.
- Sony tried to block the class action using the class action waiver in its terms of service, lost that argument in May 2024, and agreed to settle instead of going to trial.
- Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin will rule on final approval and the allocation plan at a fairness hearing in San Francisco on October 15, and no credit moves before that.
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Why it matters
- precedent Other closed storefronts can now price the downside of cutting off outside resellers at the rate this record sets: about $1.78 an account gross, payable in their own credit.
- cost Class members pay for the enforcement before they see any of it, because up to a quarter of the fund plus expenses, service awards and administration costs are taken out first.
- constraint A credit remedy only leaves the fund when a class member shops at Sony again, so the settlement is spent inside the storefront the case was about.
- exposure Any operator relying on a terms-of-service class action waiver has to account for a court that declined to enforce Sony's.
For most accounts in this class, the remedy arrives as a wallet balance that moves by about a dollar. Class counsel can request up to 25 percent of the $7.85 million plus expenses, and Engadget, assuming the full fee is granted, put the remainder at roughly $5.89 million [3][4]. Spread across the 4,407,533 accounts the administrator identified, that is $1.34 an account [2][1]. Service awards of $30,000 for the three named plaintiffs and the administration costs come out of the same fund [3].
No one gets the average. Payouts are prorated by how many qualifying purchases an account made relative to the rest of the pool [5]. Lead counsel Michael Buchanan has said individual recoveries should run from $0.91 to $33.66 in PlayStation Store credit [6]. The top of that range is 37 times the bottom [4]. Sony published a fixed list of eligible titles, including The Last of Us Remastered, Bloodborne and No Man's Sky [8]. Other digital purchases made in the window do not count [8].
The fund is paid in credit for the same store the plaintiffs said Sony had monopolized [1][10]. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin already rejected one version of this deal, finding "glaring shortcomings" in the approval motion and noting that settlements paid in credits are "generally disfavored" [15]. The version now in front of her is still paid in credit [1].
Sony settled a case that had been thrown out once. Chief Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the original complaint on July 15, 2022, ruling that the plaintiffs had not adequately alleged anticompetitive conduct [12]. He gave them leave to amend [12]. The reworked complaint survived in February 2023, when Seeborg found it plausibly alleged that Sony "sacrificed short-term profits for long-term gain" by cutting retailers off [13].
The class window covers 57 months of purchases, from April 1, 2019 to December 31, 2023 [1][3]. Measured against the gross fund, the conduct prices out at about $138,000 a month [5].
For anyone running a closed store, the useful part is where liability attached. It attached to what happened to prices afterward. The class screen requires a title to have had a retail voucher, at least 200 redemptions, and a price rise of at least 50 cents once the codes stopped, all of which a seller's own catalog records [7].
So the check before removing an outside seller has two inputs a pricing team already holds. One is whether list prices move up after the channel closes, and whether that move is visible in the company's price history. The other is how many accounts bought the affected titles. With no price rise, a class has nothing to screen on. With one, the exposure is the rise multiplied by the account count. The rate this record sets is $1.78 an account gross, paid in credit [2][1].
What to watch
- Whether the judge approves the allocation plan or sends a credit-based deal back for a second time.
- The size of the final fee award, since every dollar not awarded to class counsel raises the per-account credit.
- An appeal after final approval, which would hold up credits already assigned to accounts.