Locked Out of a Few PlayStation Titles? You’re Not Alone
Something strange is happening in PlayStation’s world. It was business as usual, players accessing their digitally-purchased games and going through the usual steps. These players would fire up their PS Vita or PS3, looking forward to a day of fun and frolic in their favorite RPGs of days gone by. Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VI… but something strange happened to each of these digital PlayStation titles.
So did @PlayStation expire the PSOne Classics versions of #ChronoCross and #ChronoTrigger by setting the date on new downloads to 12/31/1969? This is preventing me from playing my purchased copies on Vita and PS3. @ModernVintageG @dark1x pic.twitter.com/wxRebNIZWh
— Christopher Foose (@FooseTV) April 8, 2022
They… expired? They’ve been expired for decades? The players discovered an expiry date attached to each game, set for December 31st, 1969. And since 2022 is a little bit past that date, the games were effectively bricked.
As you may have guessed, this is clearly a bug of some sort. As Kotaku pointed out, “the issue may stem from a glitch causing the PS Vita and PS3 to revert the game licenses’ expiration dates to the Unix epoch, or the arbitrary time and date set by developers to designate the beginning of a console’s life.” Either way, though, the games are totally unplayable as of right now.
Stranger still, PlayStation has not yet given any sort of response on this issue. Total radio silence. Considering the age of the consoles, this does not bode well. Sony may lack interest in updating a service this old, especially since they’ve been scaling things back already, moving on to bigger and brighter futures.