Sony Sets The Record Straight On The PS5 DRM Freak Out

Over the weekend, YouTuber Modded {Hardware} found a brand new expiration date for digital PlayStation video games that recommended gamers can be locked out of their purchases with out common on-line checks. Confusion ensued, adopted by shades of Xbox’s disastrously acquired digital DRM plans forward of the launch of the Xbox One. Sony has lastly stepped in with an official assertion on the matter.

“Gamers can proceed to entry and play their bought video games as typical,” a spokesperson for the corporate told GameSpot in a new statement. “A one-time on-line examine is required to substantiate the sport’s license, after which no additional check-ins are required.”

As Kotaku previously reported, the worry was that gamers would wish to routinely hook up with the web as a way to proceed accessing their digital video games. As an alternative, it seems that new purchases now merely have a short lived license that must be authenticated in some unspecified time in the future as a way to convert it right into a everlasting license.

“The best way we perceive it at the moment is that there was an extra layer of DRM launched to fight fraudulent behaviour from customers,” DoesItPlay’s proprietor, Clemens Istel, instructed us. “Our greatest guess is that this may need to do with a refund rip-off we’ve heard about. It may additionally be about the recently reported exploit surrounding the Star Wars Racer game.”

Sony’s assertion doesn’t handle that hypothesis about why the change was carried out, and it actually looks as if it does introduce a minimum of one further layer of on-line checks that didn’t exist earlier than. Nevertheless it’s nowhere close to the Computer virus for a brand new period of aggressive DRM on PlayStation that some gamers had been worrying about.