How to get your cut of PlayStation's $7.85 million settlement

However, no money can change hands until Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the US District Court for the Northern District of California grants final approval at a fairness hearing in October. Don't mark your calendar and start building a wishlist just yet, though, because more than 4.4 million eligible accounts have been identified. That means once legal fees come out of the fund, the typical share will work out to a less-than-princely sum of a dollar or two in store credit per eligible purchase.

If approved, the deal will settle a PlayStation Store class action lawsuit under the Sherman Act, first filed way back in May 2021 over Sony's decision to stop letting retailers like Amazon and GameStop (other outlets are available) sell download codes for PlayStation games. In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that ending those codes in April 2019 eliminated the only retail price competition digital PlayStation games had, leaving Sony with a monopoly and the freedom to charge more on its storefront.

You're only eligible for a settlement payout if you bought a game that had a download voucher available via retail before April 1, 2019. In addition, the game must have had at least 200 voucher redemptions and its price must have rose by at least 50 cents after Sony ended the vouchers. Sony has provided a fixed list of eligible titles from its catalog, which include The Last of Us Remastered , Bloodborne and Until Dawn , as well as third-party releases like NBA 2K18 and No Man's Sky . Other digital purchases made during the window don't count.

Each account's payout will be prorated based on how many qualifying purchases it made relative to the other 4.4 million accounts in the pool. Lawyers will naturally take their cut first, and they're entitled to request attorneys' fees of up to 25 percent of the settlement, plus expenses, $30,000 in service awards for the three named plaintiffs and administration costs. It's safe to assume the full 25 percent fee award will be spoken for, leaving roughly $5.89 million to be spread across 4,407,533 accounts. How far that money will go and how much each account will be awarded depends on the total number of qualifying purchases and how many of them were made on each account. Lead counsel Michael Buchanan has said that individual recoveries should range from $0.91 to $33.66 in PlayStation Store credit.

The final fairness hearing is scheduled to begin on October 15 before Judge Martínez-Olguín in San Francisco, where the court will rule on final approval and the allocation plan. It's only after this hearing that any credits will be paid out, assuming there's no appeal.

charnsitr/Shutterstock Agustin Caccuri sued Sony on May 5, 2021, two years after game-specific vouchers had stopped being supplied to retailers. Two other lawsuits from Adrian Cendejas and Allen Neumark arose from this, which were later consolidated into Caccuri's case as a class action. Before April 2019, retailers could use these vouchers to discount digital titles against PlayStation Store pricing, but afterward, Sony's storefront became the only place to buy digital games.