Update: April 27 at 5:32 p.m. PST: PlayStation has seemingly confirmed the presence of a 30-day license check. An official statement has not followed.
PlayStation now shows a timer for newly-purchased digital games on PS4, indicating how long you have left before the license expires.
As reported by YouTuber and modder Lance McDonald, this is part of a new DRM update that requires you to "check-in" and verify game licenses every 30 days by going online. If you fail to do this within the "valid period", you will be locked out of the game in question, essentially meaning that any digitally-purchased PlayStation games now have an expiration date when playing offline.
You cannot avoid the countdown by using "Activate console as primary."
This update also impacts PS5 titles, but there is no timer visible on the information page. Instead, if you fail to verify the license within 30 days, an error message will display when starting the game. The system appears to have been quietly added in March's firmware update, hence why users are only noticing it now, and Sony has not yet issued a comment on the situation or its future plans.
"The Sony DRM Issue Is Unintentional"
However, according to Does It Play?, a popular X account dedicated to game preservation, the timer and license verification were pushed live by accident.
As pointed out by Lance McDonald, games purchased prior to the March firmware update appear to be unaffected.
"Received word from an anonymous insider," they said. "The Sony DRM issue is unintentional. From what we gathered, Sony accidentally broke something while fixing an exploit. They've known about the confusing UI for a while, but didn't see it as urgent."
Regardless of whether it was intentional, the update proves that Sony is working on check-in systems behind-the-scenes to verify licenses, setting a worrying precedent for game ownership, an increasingly hot-button topic as campaigns like Stop Killing Games continue to gain traction as they push for more consumer-friendly measures.
"Everybody should keep an eye on the discovered PlayStation DRM timer until actually fixed," Does It Play? urged. "It might not have been activated on purpose this time, but it still exists. Similar thing Xbox rightfully got slaughtered for during the Xbox One reveal."
Indeed, in 2013, Xbox announced a game licensing system that would check your console every 24 hours to verify ownership of each title. If you failed to go online in this period, games would stop working. The announcement proved so controversial that just a few days later, Microsoft walked back these plans almost entirely.
13 years later, despite PlayStation's system being limited to new digital purchases, whereas the Xbox One planned to limit physical discs, too, the reaction is much the same: users are flogging Sony as they demand the system be reversed as soon as possible.
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