Don’t spend it all at once.
Sony will deposit PlayStation Store credit directly into eligible US PlayStation Network accounts to satisfy a $7.85 million antitrust settlement, and many will be happy to know that there is no claim form to fill out. Anyone who purchased an eligible digital game between April 1, 2019 and December 31, 2023 was automatically enrolled, according to the official settlement website.
However, no money can change hands until Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California gives final approval during a fairness hearing in October. Don’t mark your calendar and start creating a wishlist just yet, because over 4.4 million eligible accounts have been identified. This means that once legal fees are taken out of the fund, the typical share will amount to a less-than-princely sum of a dollar or two in store credit per qualifying purchase.
If approved, the deal will end a PlayStation Store class action lawsuit under the Sherman Act, first filed in May 2021 following 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 the end of these codes in April 2019 eliminated the only retail price competition for digital PlayStation games, leaving Sony with a monopoly and the freedom to charge more in its storefront.
Who gets paid?
You are only eligible for a settlement payment if you purchased a game for which a download voucher was available at retail before April 1, 2019. Additionally, the game must have been redeemed at least 200 times and its price must have increased 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 us Remastered, Transmitted by blood And Until dawnas well as third-party versions like NBA 2K18 And No Man’s Sky. Other digital purchases made during the window do not count.
Each account’s payout will be prorated based on the number of eligible purchases made compared to the 4.4 million other accounts in the pool. The attorneys will naturally take their cut first, and they are entitled to seek attorneys’ fees of up to 25 percent of the settlement, plus costs, $30,000 in awards for service for the three named plaintiffs, and administrative costs. It’s reasonable to assume that the full 25 percent fee will be taken into account, leaving approximately $5.89 million spread across 4,407,533 accounts. How far this money will go and how much each account will be awarded depends on the total number of eligible purchases and how many of them were made on each account. Lead attorney Michael Buchanan said individual recoveries are expected to range between $0.91 and $33.66 in PlayStation Store credit.
The final equity hearing is scheduled to begin October 15 before Judge Martínez-Olguín in San Francisco, where the court will rule on the final approval and allocation plan. Only after this hearing will the credits be released, assuming there is no appeal.
How Sony got here
Agustin Caccuri sued Sony on May 5, 2021, two years after game-specific vouchers stopped being provided to retailers. Two other lawsuits filed by Adrian Cendejas and Allen Neumark resulted 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 from PlayStation Store prices, but subsequently Sony’s storefront became the only place to purchase digital games. According to the complaint, this constituted monopolization under the Sherman Act.
The initial complaint was dismissed on July 15, 2022, when Chief Judge Richard Seeborg ruled that the plaintiffs had not adequately alleged anticompetitive behavior. He gave them permission 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 gains” by removing retailers. Sony then attempted to block the class action by using the class action waiver in its terms of service, but the court rejected this decision 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 deficiencies” in the motion for approval and noted that settlements paid in credits rather than cash are “generally disfavored.” A renewed petition was filed on February 26 of this year with a reworked allocation plan, and the settlement received preliminary approval in April 2026.
While Sony closes the case for $7.85 million, a settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing and does not change how the PlayStation Store operates. Sales vouchers do not return; its storefront remains the only 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 about 12 million consumers, was tried by the Competition Appeal Tribunal last spring, with the judgment still pending.
