Is it a technical glitch or Sony’s way of slowly diverting attention away from its older games…?

If you see someone who plays on PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Vita, don’t laugh: on these platforms, you can also download old games that are not (at least _legally_) available elsewhere. One of the PS3/PS Vita duo benefits is the PSOne Classics category, i.e. games released on PS1 that the two newer Sony platforms can play without any issues. Except there’s a minor bug on the PlayStation Store backend that prevents us from accessing them…

You can see what the bug is on Twitter (). There are problems with the expiry date: on the one hand, December 31 1969, was more than half a century ago, and on the other hand, it’s not possible to access Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy Origins or Rune Factory: Ocean, for example, because the expiry date is 1969/1970, and if it shows a date in the past, you can’t access the game.

According to Kotaku, the bug is around the Unix epoch. The engineers set an arbitrary time that the operating system’s internal clock runs from. It could cause the license for games to expire by default, as we’re a little bit ahead of January 1, 1970, so even if you’re eligible for content you’ve bought on the PlayStation Store, the date means you can’t until Sony fixes the bug.

If they do: Sony has previously announced that it plans to close PlayStation Store on the PlayStation Portable, the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Vita. The lock is already on the door for the PSP, but there was such an outcry around the PS3 and PS Vita that Sony had to back down, so the PlayStation Store still works on the two older hardware devices if you browse from there.

But, and here we could go into conspiracy theories, what if Sony’s negligence (because it could happen…) pushed gamers to PlayStation 5 to access these games with the more expensive PlayStation Plus subscriptions?

Source: PSU