Sony Tells a Judge That Thinking You Own Your PlayStation Games Is Unreasonable

You've clicked a button that says Buy. On the PlayStation Store it says Buy Now, then Confirm Purchase, and then the money leaves your account and the game shows up in your library. Sony's lawyers have now told a federal judge that if you walked away from that thinking you bought something, your understanding wasn't a reasonable one.

That's the argument in a motion Sony filed on August 21 in Heycock v. Sony Corporation of America, the proposed class action over PlayStation Store checkout language now in front of Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco. Sony's filing says "reasonable consumers would not be misled" into believing they own the digital games they buy, and that its checkout already does what California law asks, because you agree to the license terms before the purchase goes through. The Software Product License Agreement puts it flatly: "The software is licensed to you, not sold."

What the plaintiffs are claiming

The suit leans on California's AB 2426, which took effect at the start of 2025. The law says a seller can't use words like "buy" or "purchase" for a digital product that can be taken away later, unless the buyer gets a clear, conspicuous disclosure or affirmatively acknowledges that what they're getting is a license. The four PlayStation customers who brought the case say Sony's Buy Now and Confirm Purchase buttons do the first half of that and skip the second.

Sony's response goes further than "we complied." It argues that nobody reasonable could have thought otherwise in the first place. Part of the reasoning is that a digital game gets sold to thousands of people at once, so no single buyer walks away with the only copy, and therefore no buyer could have believed they were getting ownership of one. It's a tidy piece of logic. It also has very little to do with what a person is thinking while they press a button labeled Buy.

Arbitration is the actual fight

What Sony filed is a motion to compel arbitration. If it wins, the case leaves the courtroom and goes to a private arbitrator, one plaintiff at a time, with no class and no public record. That's what the PlayStation Network terms of service are built to do, and it's what most big platform terms are built to do. Sony's clause bars class actions outright, so winning this motion makes the class disappear regardless of what anyone thinks about the Buy button. Sony has a motion to dismiss on file too, but arbitration is the one that would end the public phase of this before a judge weighs in on the merits at all.

The plaintiffs' opposition brief is due September 4. Sony's reply is due September 11. Chhabria has set a hearing for October 1 in San Francisco covering both motions at once. Anything that happens on the ownership question happens after that, if it happens at all.

Sony isn't the odd one out

Sony also isn't doing anything unusual here. License-not-sale is how essentially the whole digital media business works: Steam does it, the Xbox store does it, and so do your Kindle books and your iTunes movies. Sony wrote the same sentence into its agreement that everyone else wrote into theirs, it's been sitting there for years, and any of those companies would file the same motion if they were the ones getting sued.

The gap the complaint points at sits between the license and the interface. The license says you're getting something revocable. The interface says Buy, in a box, next to a price, laid out like every other store you've ever used online. Both are Sony's. Only one of them is the part most customers ever read.

If the October 1 hearing goes Sony's way, none of this gets argued in public. The case moves into arbitration, the class goes away, and the Buy button stays exactly where it is.