What are we asking, as PS5 owners? Lift the permanent bans of our systems. The arbitrary decision of bricking a console forever should not be allowed in 2020. Even when there is Terms and Conditions involved, there is no real explanation or connection between them, and the follow-up that is going to be described below.

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As a lot of players around the world may know, the launch of the new PlayStation 5 brought a new service called PlayStation Plus Collection, which lets you redeem 20 games for free on any account that is subscribed to the service, from a PlayStation 5.

Thousands of players around the world quickly saw the opportunity to grab these free games for their own use, as well as redeeming them on friends accounts while they wait to get their hands on a new PS5, which seems to be sold out worldwide, or being re-selled by scalpers.

This friendly action of helping those who wanted the games on their accounts, led to a terrible issue for those who personally OWN a PlayStation 5, either the Digital or Physical version, because Sony along with PlayStation Safety have been suspending permanently the access to PlayStation Network services to anybody that has logged on a “suspicious” amount of accounts in the same system, which leds to many questions about how they make these decisions, given that no e-mails are sent to those who got their PS5s banned and they don’t offer any information about these cases apart from the cheap excuse that “Terms of Use were violated and they took action”.

1) This new service, called PlayStation Plus Collection, DOES NOT SPECIFY any exclusivity to PS5 system HOLDERS, which leads to players around the world redeeming the games for their friends and in many cases, family members or alternative accounts that they may use, even when they are free to do so. Apart from that, there is no specified limits on how many accounts can redeem these games on the same PS5 system, with cases of permanent bans on consoles with an user count lower than 10 accounts, as well as more than 40.

2) The new PlayStation 5 comes with a new functionality called “Play as a One-Time Guest” which makes it easier to set up new accounts and because of that, makes the whole process of redeeming games on friends accounts faster and much more secure. You don’t even need to ask for an e-mail address or password, because this function allows any PS5 owner to log in to a different account with just a QR code, and then just log off while the “new user” gets deleted right away, which led to a feeling that these should not cause any harm on the system or violate any terms and conditions, given that the whole function is intended to use accounts of friends or family members on the same system, with no warnings about how this might affect anything in the future, and with the assumption that it’s just for a short period of time.

3) Permanent bans were issued to all the PS5 owners that had a “suspicious” amount of different users in their systems, even when some of them were created as “One-Time Guests” and got deleted minutes later. PlayStation Safety is claiming that the reason of these massive suspensions comes from “Hacking or Exploiting the system”, which is not justified with any real evidence or register log that could determine that the system was actually hacked or exploited in any kind of way. This is incredibly unfair for those who had no more than 10 accounts on their systems, and might make more sense for those who in fact abused this feature (related to exploiting), i.e: have used more than 300 different accounts before being suspended.

4) Even though some PS5 owners effectively abused of this new service, there is no solutions or appealing opportunities for those who didn’t.  Sony along with their Safety team ASSUMED that these actions had a negative intention on them and BANNED permanently every single console that they could. There is cases of players with 10 users or less, and they still got suspended permanently on their systems, being treated the same way as the people that might have abused of the new features. The point here, is that Sony took action assuming something that was not true, because the reason why many owners had a high amount of users in their systems was due to the service that they advertised as free, and available to anybody that has a subscription active, and not because of an actual account hacking scheme or personal information steal. They seem to confuse these two things, and won’t go further in their investigation, because they just don’t care and that’s what is terribly wrong here:

The decision made by Sony was arbitrary, and the alleged infraction that we as PS5 owners supposedly did, is not specified in the Terms and Conditions. There is no specified limits on how many accounts can be logged in the same PS5 system, as well as a lifetime limit that could exist, which leads to the last point of this thread;

Sony is limiting the number of users that logged in at least once to the PSN servers on the same PlayStation 5 system, and this is leading to a major problem that is going to be massive in the upcoming years. The second hand market for these systems is being threatened, and soon there will be problems to those who bought an used console and might have multiple users or account for their own use.