“Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on traditional PlayStation consoles,” Kotaku experiences, “rendering a random assortment of video games unplayable.”
The glitch is “affecting customers’ means to play video games they ostensibly personal.”
Upon re-downloading the PSOne Traditional model of Chrono Cross, as an example, Twitter person Christopher Foose was instructed the acquisition expired on December 31, 1969, stopping him from taking part in the sport on each PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Attempting in addition up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran mentioned, gave him the identical expiration date and time, solely adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did point out, nonetheless, that he was capable of obtain the PSOne Traditional from his library and play simply positive on Vita regardless of the sport’s obvious delisting from the hand held’s retailer.
Whereas at first this felt like an try at encouraging Chrono Cross followers to buy the brand new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku shortly discovered proof of this identical drawback occurring with completely different video games. Chrono Cross labored simply positive for content material creator Phrases, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which by some means lapsed 40 years earlier than the sport was added to the PSOne Traditional library.
Steve J over on Twitter requested PlayStation immediately why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was modified to 1969, however by no means acquired a response….
The one potential clarification I’ve seen for this challenge so far entails what’s often known as the “Unix epoch,” or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the start of the working system’s lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony’s backend could also be defaulting PlayStation recreation license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, basically telling them they cannot be performed after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.