Old Sony consoles can’t play PS Store games due to calendar error

Gamers looking to play games from Sony’s digital stores on their PlayStation consoles and handhelds are running into an issue with expired licenses. According to the stores, their license to play the game expired around New Year’s Day 1970, the Unix Epoch.

According to an round-up of Kotaku the problem occurs on a multitude of Sony platforms, but nothing newer than the 2011 PS Vita. For example, players are reporting that they can’t play Chrono Cross, originally a PS1 game, on their PS Vita and PlayStation 3. Others players again report that they cannot play their entire digital Vita library.

The problem, as outlined by a photo of an affected user, is that somehow the license expiration date is set to 12/31/1969. That date is suspiciously close to the so-called Unix Epoch, the point set as ‘zero’ on the calendar. The usefulness of this is that with the help of a calendar zero, a date and time can be noted as an integer, which represents the amount of seconds or milliseconds that have elapsed since the calendar zero. Presumably something goes wrong with Sony’s systems, causing the moment of expiration to jump to zero.

Affected users report that Sony customer service offers advice along the lines of “do a factory reset on your console” and variations thereof, to no avail. Sony had not responded to a request for comment from Kotaku before publishing their piece on Friday.

It’s not the first time Sony has made it difficult to play classic games on its older platforms, although this case doesn’t seem to be happening on purpose. Last year Sony wanted to close the PS Stores for the PlayStation 3, PS Vita and PSP. This meant that a lot of old games were in danger of becoming unavailable or very difficult to obtain. Gamers expressed their dissatisfaction with this and Sony backed down, although the PSP store remained doomed. It closed last year, but PSP games can still be purchased via the PS3 and Vita.