PS5 Users Panic As Physical Game Completion Data Looks To Be Wiped By PlayStation
Topics: PlayStation, PlayStation 5, Sony
Featured Image Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Topics: PlayStation, PlayStation 5, Sony
PlayStation 5 users are missing physical game data amid the unveiling of PlayStation’s all-digital future.
Many PS5 users are reporting that they cannot easily view trophy data or their hours played for physical games on their home page.
“In case you're not aware, PlayStation had some fun deleting absolutely all your playtime hours and PSN trophies from all your physical games on your profile,” said Twitter/X user tortuenoire23.
“If the game has digital content that you've installed, you can still see your game in the list.”
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A similar tweet surfaced from mugiseb: “The situation with PlayStation is getting worse; now they're also removing the record of your physical games and secondary accounts from your played games profile in the app.”
To make it clear, some gamers cannot even see their physical games in their game history at all.
This may seem like PlayStation is already beginning its phasing out of physical media, but this is actually all tied to a rather unfortunate bug.
If you’re not seeing trophy data on your home page, it should appear in the trophy tab for now, and the absence or resetting of playtime on your console’s homepage for physical games is a temporary glitch that should be rectified in due course.
Thankfully, one user was able to get in touch with PlayStation Support, who acknowledged that they are “aware that some PlayStation users are experiencing online access issues, which include discrepancies with game history, missing physical titles, and inaccurate play time counters”.
They continued: “Our engineering team is actively investigating the issue in order to deploy a fix as quickly as possible. Please note that disc-based game data and some recent activity updates will remain unavailable or will not display correctly until this restoration is completed.”
Thankfully, this isn’t tied to PlayStation’s upcoming all-digital shift, but it does raise yet more alarm bells about what that future might look like.
Access to our games in a digital age is heavily reliant on technologies we don’t have control over.
Gaming has been changed forever in recent days due to PlayStation’s announcement, and very much for the worse.
From January 2028, the company will cease production on all physical games; it is now looking that this will apply to both first and third-party releases.
The company blamed “consumer preferences” and “shifting trends”, although a lot of the data that suggests digital copies are more popular is skewed.
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It takes into account all game sales, including the thousands of indie games that are only launched digitally anyway, making the preference for digital seem astronomically higher.
During the Insomniac Games leak several years ago, data came to light that actually proved most PlayStation first-party releases sold more physical copies.
God of War Ragnarök, at the point the data was taken, had sold 76% physical copies. Astro Bot was sitting at a 55% physical majority, with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sitting at a similar majority of 54%.
When you purchase a digital game on PlayStation, you’re actually only purchasing a license that can be revoked at any time. Then there’s the fact that, one day, the software and storefronts pertaining to this generation will be shut down, blocking us from ever playing our games again.
Then there’s cost. Physical games often end up on sale far more often and far cheaper than digital games do, with many AAA digital games holding their RRP for many years.
Gaming’s future has never looked so uncertain, and while PlayStation was likely anticipating a bad PR hit, I wonder if they’d predicted just how much outrage they’d see.