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

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 Years Day 1970, the Unix Epoch.

According to an round-up van 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 have their entire digital Vitalibrary can’t play.

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 zero point on the calendar a date and time can be noted as a 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. Sony wanted the PS Stores for the PlayStation 3, PS Vita and PSP last year shut down† As a result, a lot of old games were in danger of becoming unavailable or very difficult to obtain. Gamers expressed their dissatisfaction with this and Sony scribbled back, though the PSP store remained doomed. It closed last year, but PSP games can still be bought via PS3 on Vita.

–