PlayStation owners who bought certain digital games before April 2019 may receive a small payout under a $7.85 million class action settlement with Sony. The deal cannot be completed until Judge Araceli MartĂnez-OlguĂn of the US District Court for the Northern District of California grants final approval at a fairness hearing scheduled for October 15 in San Francisco. More than 4.4 million eligible accounts have been identified, and after legal fees are deducted, the typical share is expected to amount to a dollar or two in PlayStation Store credit per qualifying purchase.
The settlement resolves a Sherman Act lawsuit first filed in May 2021 over Sony's decision to stop allowing retailers such as Amazon and GameStop to sell download codes for PlayStation games. The plaintiffs argued that ending the codes in April 2019 removed the only retail price competition for digital PlayStation games, leaving Sony with a monopoly and the ability to charge more on its storefront. Sony has not admitted wrongdoing, and the settlement does not change how the PlayStation Store operates. Retail vouchers will not return, and the storefront remains the sole source for digital PlayStation games.
To qualify, an account must have bought a game that had a retail download voucher available before April 1, 2019. The game also must have had at least 200 voucher redemptions and its price must have risen by at least 50 cents after Sony ended the vouchers. Sony provided a fixed list of eligible titles, including The Last of Us Remastered, Bloodborne and Until Dawn, along with third-party releases such as NBA 2K18 and No Man's Sky. Other digital purchases made during the window do not count.
Payouts will be prorated based on how many qualifying purchases each account made relative to the other 4,407,533 accounts in the pool. Lawyers are entitled to request attorneys' fees of up to 25 percent of the settlement, plus expenses, $30,000 in service awards for the three named plaintiffs and administration costs. If the full 25 percent fee is awarded, roughly $5.89 million would remain to be divided among eligible accounts. Lead counsel Michael Buchanan has said individual recoveries should range from $0.91 to $33.66 in PlayStation Store credit.
The case began when Agustin Caccuri sued Sony on May 5, 2021, two years after game-specific vouchers stopped being supplied to retailers. Two other lawsuits, from Adrian Cendejas and Allen Neumark, arose from the same issue and were later consolidated into Caccuri's case as a class action. Judge MartĂnez-OlguĂn rejected the first version of the settlement, citing "glaring shortcomings" in the approval motion and noting that settlements paid in credits rather than cash are generally disfavored. A renewed motion was filed on February 26 with a reworked allocation plan, and the settlement received preliminary approval in April 2026.
Credits will be paid only after the fairness hearing, assuming no appeal. A separate and larger antitrust fight over PlayStation Store pricing is underway in London, where a $2.7 billion lawsuit brought on behalf of around 12 million consumers went to trial at the Competition Appeal Tribunal this past spring. A judgment in that case is still pending.
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