According to Bloomberg, Sony Interactive Entertainment was recently sued for allowing the Playstation Store to be the only outlet for users to download digital games. The proposed class-action lawsuit alleges Sony has “monopoly control over the market for downloadable PlayStation games.”
“Sony’s ability to maintain supracompetitive prices on the PlayStation Store while
consumers continue to switch from disks to digital games in ever-increasing numbers, along with Sony’s skyrocketing revenues from digital games, demonstrate that prices for digital games on the PlayStation store are not responsive to changes in prices for PlayStation games on disk,” the lawsuit reads. “As a direct and proximate result of Sony’s unlawful acquisition and maintenance
of a monopoly over the sale of digital PlayStation games, Plaintiff and Class members have paid and will continue to pay significantly more for digital games than they would have absent Sony’s monopoly.”
The lawsuit was filed in a Northern California Federal Court. Sony has not yet responded to a request for comments.
The Profit‘s Take:
All of these walled-garden app stores are under fire and in the crosshairs of lawsuits. It will be interesting to see which are left standing after the dust settles. We said years ago that game distribution was going to be a war that would last a while.
(All information was provided by ARS Technica, Polygon, Gamesindustry.biz, and Bloomberg)
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