[Reuters] US judge rejects Sony settlement over PlayStation game sales

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July 18 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge in California has declined to approve a class action settlement with Sony that would have distributed $7.8 million in electronic credits to millions of users of the company's PlayStation video game consoles.

Sony had agreed to the settlement to resolve claims that it overcharged for digital games, but U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in San Francisco said in a ruling, on Thursday that the plaintiffs had not convinced her the accord was adequate.

Martínez-Olguín described the agreement as a coupon settlement, and said those types of deals are generally disfavored.
The judge said the consumers who brought the case can file a revised proposal.

Michael Buchman, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, declined to comment. Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiffs, who estimated the class size at more than 4.4 million individuals, sued Sony after its 2019 move to bar retailers such as Best Buy and GameStop from selling so-called download codes for digital PlayStation games.

The lawsuit accused Sony of illegally monopolizing the sale of digital PlayStation games.

Martínez-Olguín in her ruling said any updated settlement proposal should show how the "value and structure of this settlement remain defensible," with an estimate of what individual class members would receive. She asked for examples of comparable cases and their outcomes.

In a court filing, Sony said it was settling to avoid the further expense and distraction of continued litigation. The company denied any wrongdoing.

The settlement period covers eligible PlayStation game purchases made between April 2019 and December 2023, according to court filings.

The plaintiffs' lawyers in a filing in December said they had invested about 13,700 hours in the litigation, which began in 2021. They had planned to seek up to about 33% of the settlement for legal fees, or about $2.61 million.

The case is Agustin Caccuri et al v. Sony Interactive Entertainment, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 3:21-cv-03361-AMO.



Corporations have zero backbone. If they are going to "deny any wrongdoing" then fight the damn lawsuit.
 
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I just got out of an appendectomy, I would love for my wife's boyfriend to send me a Switch 2, but i didnt do a vasectomy so, my loss.
 
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Corporations have zero backbone. If they are going to "deny any wrongdoing" then fight the damn lawsuit.

The problem is that the risk is too great.

If you have a shitty biased activist judge and lose, it creates precedent that would vritually destroy Playstation's business model. Sony cannot afford to give up their walled garden.
 
Infrequent but not uncommon. I imagine plaintiffs' attorneys are more upset than defense counsel that this case has to continue on (seems like they want to avoid committing more resources to this case, as does Sony).

I suspect they'll hash it out, but the judge wants to see Sony output something more than "we're sorry, have 25% off your next purchase." That is a wholly unsatisfactory remedy IMO.
 
July 18 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge in California has declined to approve a class action settlement with Sony that would have distributed $7.8 million in electronic credits to millions of users of the company's PlayStation video game consoles.

Sony had agreed to the settlement to resolve claims that it overcharged for digital games, but U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in San Francisco said in a ruling, on Thursday that the plaintiffs had not convinced her the accord was adequate.

Martínez-Olguín described the agreement as a coupon settlement, and said those types of deals are generally disfavored.
The judge said the consumers who brought the case can file a revised proposal.

Michael Buchman, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, declined to comment. Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiffs, who estimated the class size at more than 4.4 million individuals, sued Sony after its 2019 move to bar retailers such as Best Buy and GameStop from selling so-called download codes for digital PlayStation games.

The lawsuit accused Sony of illegally monopolizing the sale of digital PlayStation games.

Martínez-Olguín in her ruling said any updated settlement proposal should show how the "value and structure of this settlement remain defensible," with an estimate of what individual class members would receive. She asked for examples of comparable cases and their outcomes.

In a court filing, Sony said it was settling to avoid the further expense and distraction of continued litigation. The company denied any wrongdoing.

The settlement period covers eligible PlayStation game purchases made between April 2019 and December 2023, according to court filings.

The plaintiffs' lawyers in a filing in December said they had invested about 13,700 hours in the litigation, which began in 2021. They had planned to seek up to about 33% of the settlement for legal fees, or about $2.61 million.

The case is Agustin Caccuri et al v. Sony Interactive Entertainment, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 3:21-cv-03361-AMO.



Corporations have zero backbone. If they are going to "deny any wrongdoing" then fight the damn lawsuit.
7.8 million dollars? lol whats that like 5-10 cents to each user? lol no wonder the judge denied it.

Edit: 4.4 million individuals are listed as impacted so around a dollar after attorneys' cost. Still lol
 
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Fuck Sony, hope they don't get to settle and have the courts actually change their behavior. Monopolistic bastards.

WTF?!?

That would ruin console gaming forever.

And quite how does Sony have a monopoly? Gamers are free to buy physical games which drop in price quickly.

Equally, it's the publishers who set the game pricing on Sony's store. Not Sony.

This is a weird-ass, truly ignorant take.
 
WTF?!?

That would ruin console gaming forever.

And quite how does Sony have a monopoly? Gamers are free to buy physical games which drop in price quickly.

Equally, it's the publishers who set the game pricing on Sony's store. Not Sony.

This is a weird-ass, truly ignorant take.
Nah you're ignorant. PSN should be more like Steam specially with the stuff the article is discussing, of they were they wouldn't have gotten sued.
 
Nah you're ignorant. PSN should be more like Steam specially with the stuff the article is discussing, of they were they wouldn't have gotten sued.

Sony, MS and Nintendo get BS frivolous lawsuits all the time. That's not evidence of anything.

And no PSN should not be more like Steam. A console is not a PC. The business model is entirely different. But you'd know that if you weren't entirely ignorant.
 
WTF?!?

That would ruin console gaming forever.

And quite how does Sony have a monopoly? Gamers are free to buy physical games which drop in price quickly.

Equally, it's the publishers who set the game pricing on Sony's store. Not Sony.

This is a weird-ass, truly ignorant take.
Sony, MS and Nintendo get BS frivolous lawsuits all the time. That's not evidence of anything.

And no PSN should not be more like Steam. A console is not a PC. The business model is entirely different. But you'd know that if you weren't entirely ignorant.

I think if you read the OP, you'd see it wasn't about the walled garden, but about Sony stopping retailers from selling digital codes for games since April 2019. Since that date, you can only buy PSN wallet funds and have to make all purchases from PSN.
Xbox - for example - is still a walled garden but you can buy digital games off online retailers and redeem the codes in the store.

The argument from the lawsuit is that restricting digital game sales to PSN only, consumers don't get the benefit of retailer discounts etc

Perhaps understand the issue first before calling others ignorant?

Note that I'm not saying I agree with the lawsuit. It just doesn't seem THAT frivolous, but I'm not sure how much retailers were discounting games before the block, since I leant overwhelmingly physical around that time.
 
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