MMO Business Roundup: PS Store lawsuit, tariff refunds, and Tim Sweeney

Welcome back to yet another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! In this bundle, we’ve got an update on a lawsuit, game corps effectively saying “no soup for you,” and Tim Sweeney analyzing the industry again. Strap down and dive in, friends.

Sony has responded to the PlayStation Store lawsuit that was filed by four gamers this past June over allegedly misleading “buy now” buttons, and its legal argument is pretty wild. The company says that “reasonable consumers” know they’re not actually owning a digital game because digital titles are not a finite resource and can be purchased by multiple people, so that means technically nobody owns anything. Quiet part said out loud.

Both Sony and Microsoft say tariff refunds aren’t going to consumers because, according to court filings related to ongoing lawsuits over the matter, people who bought PlayStation 5 and Xbox consoles at inflated prices got precisely the items they paid for. Readers might remember that this is a similar argument that Nintendo is using in its own similar legal battle.

Finally, we’ve got an opinion from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney about what he characterizes as gaming’s “Crash 2.0” — a reference to the infamous video game recession of 1983 and specifically in reference to the ongoing hardware shortage that’s being fueled by the ravenous appetite for AI data centers. But worry not because he thinks he has a fix: “The only solution, I think, is going to be building massive new factories to meet the world’s capacity demands – and that will happen,” he says. So that means he’ll use his vast wealth to fund that, right? Right?

sources: Game File via Video Games Chronicle, Game File via GamesRadar, GamesIndustry via Eurogamer