Don’t spend it all at once.
Sony will deposit PlayStation Store credit straight into eligible US PlayStation Network accounts to satisfy a $7.85 million antitrust settlement, and many will be happy to learn that there’s no claim form to fill in. Anyone who bought a qualifying digital game between April 1, 2019, and December 31, 2023, was enrolled automatically, according to the official settlement website.
However, no money can change hands until Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the US District Court for the Northern District of California grants final approval at a fairness hearing in October. Don’t mark your calendar and start building a wishlist just yet, though, because more than 4.4 million eligible accounts have been identified. That means once legal fees come out of the fund, the typical share will work out to a less-than-princely sum of a dollar or two in store credit per eligible purchase.
If approved, the deal will settle a PlayStation Store class action lawsuit under the Sherman Act, first filed way back in May 2021 over Sony’s decision to stop letting retailers like Amazon and GameStop (other outlets are available) sell download codes for PlayStation games. In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that ending those codes in April 2019 eliminated the only retail price competition digital PlayStation games had, leaving Sony with a monopoly and the freedom to charge more on its storefront.
Who’s getting paid?
You’re only eligible for a settlement payout if you bought a game that had a download voucher available via retail before April 1, 2019. In addition, the game must have had at least 200 voucher redemptions and its price must have rose by at least 50 cents after Sony ended the vouchers. Sony has provided a fixed list of eligible titles from its catalog, which include The Last of UsRemastered, Bloodborne and Until Dawn, as well as third-party releases like NBA 2K18 and No Man’s Sky. Other digital purchases made during the window don’t count.
Each account’s payout will be prorated based on how many qualifying purchases it made relative to the other 4.4 million accounts in the pool. Lawyers will naturally take their cut first, and they’re 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. It’s safe to assume the full 25 percent fee award will be spoken for, leaving roughly $5.89 million to be spread across 4,407,533 accounts. How far that money will go and how much each account will be awarded depends on the total number of qualifying purchases and how many of them were made on each account. Lead counsel Michael Buchanan has said that individual recoveries should range from $0.91 to $33.66 in PlayStation Store credit.
The final fairness hearing is scheduled to begin on October 15 before Judge Martínez-Olguín in San Francisco, where the court will rule on final approval and the allocation plan. It’s only after this hearing that any credits will be paid out, assuming there’s no appeal.
How Sony got here
Agustin Caccuri sued Sony on May 5, 2021, two years after game-specific vouchers had stopped being supplied to retailers. Two other lawsuits from Adrian Cendejas and Allen Neumark arose from this, which were later consolidated into Caccuri’s case as a class action. Before April 2019, retailers could use these vouchers to discount digital titles against PlayStation Store pricing, but afterward, Sony’s storefront became the only place to buy digital games. That, the complaint said, was monopolization under the Sherman Act.
The original complaint was dismissed on July 15, 2022, when Chief Judge Richard Seeborg ruled that the plaintiffs hadn’t adequately alleged anticompetitive conduct. He gave them leave to try again, and a reworked complaint followed and was upheld in February 2023, with Chief Judge Seeborg finding that it plausibly alleged that Sony “sacrificed short-term profits for long-term gain” by cutting retailers off. Sony later attempted to block the class action by using the class action waiver in its terms of service, but the court rejected this in May 2024, and Sony agreed to settle rather than go to trial.
The first version of the settlement was rejected by Judge Martínez-Olguín, who found “glaring shortcomings” in the approval motion and noted that settlements paid in credits rather than cash are “generally disfavored.” A renewed motion was filed on February 26 this year with a reworked allocation plan, and the settlement cleared preliminary approval in April 2026.
While Sony is closing out the case for $7.85 million, a settlement isn’t an admission of wrongdoing, and it changes nothing about how the PlayStation Store operates. Retail vouchers aren’t coming back; its storefront remains the sole source for digital PlayStation games. Meanwhile, a bigger fight is underway in London, where a $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit over PlayStation Store pricing, brought on behalf of around 12 million consumers, went to trial at the Competition Appeal Tribunal this past spring, with judgment still pending.
