‘Expired’ digital PS Vita and PS3 games rendered unplayable - The Verge
source link: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/10/23019235/playstation-digital-games-ps3-ps-vita-expiring-sony-chrono-trigger
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Digital PS3 and PS Vita games rendered unplayable after ‘expiring’
Players are unable to play Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and more
By Emma Roth Apr 10, 2022, 6:12pm EDT
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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Players on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita are having trouble accessing their digital purchases after a strange expiration date suddenly appeared on certain games, as first reported by Kotaku. The problem seems to mostly affect classic titles, preventing users from playing Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI, as the games are now “expired.”
But here’s the odd part: the expiration dates are dated half a century in the past. Twitter user Christopher Foose shared an image of his Chrono Cross download, which shows that the game expired on December 31st, 1969, at 7:20PM. He says the issue only occurred after redownloading the game and that he’s now unable to play it on PS3 and PS Vita.
GamesHub editor Edmond Tran similarly found he was unable to play Chrono Cross on the PS3 thanks to a 52-year-old expiration date. And while Tran says he could still play the classic title on his PS Vita, he wasn’t able to find the listing on the PS Vita store, a sign that Sony may have taken it down. Other users on Reddit and Twitter also reported the issue with Rune Factory Oceans, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Gex: Enter the Gecko, and for some, their entire digital library.
As outlined in the various threads and posts about the problem, some players say they’ve tried factory resetting their consoles, subscribing and unsubscribing to PlayStation Plus, and restoring their game licenses, all to no avail. PlayStation has yet to acknowledge the situation, and the game company didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
There is one possible reason why this may be happening, though. Kotaku notes that the issue may stem from a glitch causing the PS Vita and PS3 to revert the game licenses’ expiration dates to the Unix epoch, or the arbitrary time and date set by developers to designate the beginning of a console’s life.
Even if this is just a glitch, it’s stoking concerns that Sony is dealing yet another blow to the PS3 and PS Vita stores. After the game company nearly closed down both stores last year, it made them harder to shop at by taking away the ability to use credit cards or PayPal to make purchases.
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There are 51 comments.
So, 3 Square Enix games? Clearly a bug, sure it will be resolved soon.
The title of this article is really click bait. Maybe say ‘3 Square Enix games unplayable etc’ you made it sound like all or super wide spread,
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 6:35 PM
From the third paragraph:
Other users on Reddit and Twitter also reported the issue with Rune Factory Oceans, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Gex: Enter the Gecko, and for some, their entire digital library.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 6:48 PM
Maybe try reading the article..? I don’t know. Just a thought. 
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 3:23 AM
This is why preserving digital copies of games and software is so important. Many of these games are going to completely disappear. That might not seem realistic ("you can still play games all the way back to PS3…") but think about movies from the 1930s and 40s that are completely lost to time. A lot of these games will be made by some studio, that gets acquired by another studio, that gets acquired by one of the big studios, and that game just disappears, never to be seen again.
And that’s just the binary, doesn’t even get into the source code.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 6:46 PM
While I don’t think it was malicious, the timing on Chrono Cross is bad considering it just launched on Steam and I imagine other storefronts within the past week or so.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 5:27 AM
Isn’t it great living in an age where we get to own and use the things that we buy right up until the point that our corporate overlords say otherwise.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 6:58 PM
See that the thing though , you don’t own a digital purchase , you are purchasing a license to use it and that license can be revoked at any time. The same technically goes for things like BluRays and DVDs etc too, you have a license to watch whatever is on the disc under very certain circumstances.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 8:46 PM
It doesn’t matter how it works now; if it’s freakin broken, then ‘stuff’ needs to be done to fix it. I could write pages on this topic, but basically yes we should and need to preserve as much as possible.
None of us here need an explanation on what a license is.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 3:26 AM
Part of your first sentence is true, and part of it isn’t. The license you bought can’t be "revoked at any time", it’s subject to a contract you made with the company running the digital storefront, and you both have obligations under that contract. Show me where in the PSN ToS it says that your game might just stop working for no particular reason….
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 4:27 AM
Yeah turns out that system sucks. Fortunately it’s not an immutable law of the universe and it’s just shitty capitalism so there’s no reason to just accept it.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 12:54 PM
No, people with bright minds are why video games exist. People who invented vacuum tube computers. People like Steve Jobs, who invented the Apple II. People who wrote fortran code back in the 70s and still do today. People who sat down in front of a computer one day and said, "I’m going to make something."
Capitalism didn’t create ANYTHING. People did.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 4:24 PM
Even if it was unintentional, the fact that it’s possible to transform everyone’s software into digital paperweights is a real concern.
So much for the mad dash to download games from digital stores before the shop’s getting taken down, because there’s a ticking time bomb included with each purchase! Imagine if this happened after the PSN service shuts down for good one day.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 8:17 AM
Are any of these digital storefronts actually taking people’s stuff away though? Ultraviolet closed a few years ago but 99.99% of titles were transferable to Vudu. Nintendo closed the Wii Shop which does in fact suck, but I feel like every time it’s mentioned the people who lost anything (Nintendo fans) are the first to defend Nintendo’s bizarre practice of treating a digital store front of being tied to specific hardware.
Sure, Sony was going to stop letting people buy PS2 (and PS3?) and Vita games, but they weren’t going to take away your library. Microsoft shut down servers for original XBox games, but I’m pretty sure any digital library games that are still playable on XBox One or Series X are still downloadable. The only games I’ve heard of being delisted or taken off Steam are usually because of some bizarre rights issues or for ToS violating content.
Maybe I’m out of the loop, despite having sizable digital movie and games libraries, but I’m not really aware of any service taking peoples money for digital games and movies and then revoking licenses out of nowhere and laughing about it while they light cigars with $100 bills like a cartoon villain; probably because that would be really, really bad for their brand.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 3:29 PM
Microsoft did when they closed their ebook shop, they did give everyone refunds at least. Playstation Mobile also closed down and there is no way to re-download content, I lost mine when my Vita memory card corrupted itself. I’ve heard of people losing access to iTunes movies as well and I lost some when some Ultraviolet partner shutdown (they did gift me some random movies at least).
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 5:43 PM
Hi, I’m a software developer. This is pretty clearly a bug. Epoch time is the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 12:00AM and it’s used everywhere because it’s simple to perform calculations on. 99% of the time when you see a bug involving some date around the 1970s, it’s because of bad math using epoch time
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 7:14 PM
Interesting. But how is 12:00 either AM or PM? Logically it can be neither. It is either noon or midnight.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 7:21 PM
12:00 AM is midnight and 12:00 PM is noon, because that’s simply how the terms "AM" and "PM" are defined. You should have been taught this in school.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 8:28 PM
Many of parts of the world use 24hr time and so 12AM is 0000hrs
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 8:52 PM
But don’t they use analog clocks that stop at 12? At least that’s the case in Japan, we use both 12 and 24 hour clock systems, but only use analog clocks that go up to 12. So yeah, we end up confirming the time of day (gozen/gogo = before/after noon) if it isn’t obvious from context.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 8:23 AM
Five countries use 24 hour time (Romania, France, UK, Germany, and Vietnam) and in the UK it’s common for people to refer to the 12 hour clock in casual conversation. I wouldn’t consider this to be "may parts of the world."
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 9:28 AM
There’s a large non-US readership here. A large portion of the EU uses 24-hour clocks (no AM PM, clock goes from 0000 to 2359. merlotisred is probably one such person.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 11:16 PM
Adoption of 24 hour clock is a ‘fairly’ recent thing, it shouldn’t be a unreasonable expectation for anyone to understand what AM and PM are regardless of what country they’re from.
I mean AM and PM are literally Latin, it’s not an American thing.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 6:42 AM
Ah, I’d forgotten how they all just ditched their 12 hour wristwatches and have no way of knowing how to tell time on such archaic devices anymore.
Also, I’m all about Kelvin, let’s start measuring temperature in Kelvin.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 1:38 PM
I’m from the US and I understand how 24 hour clocks work. I would expect those from countries that use 24 hour clocks to know how a 12 hour clock works. It’s not some obscure standard only used by a few third world countries.
It’s one thing to try to be inclusive, but it’s another to excuse what almost has to be willful ignorance. If it’s not willful, that in some ways makes it worse. They say Americans often live under a rock…I guess we’re not the only ones.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 9:12 PM
AM means ‘before noon’ and PM means ‘after noon’. You could argue that 00:00 is before noon on the day that it occurs, but 12:00 is definitely not after noon because it cannot be after itself.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 3:27 AM
For maximum clarity, just display the time in seconds since the unix epoch.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 4:15 AM
might as well create a 4 line html file with an embedded script to display it while you’re at it
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 5:16 AM
you should have been taught in school tha US is not the world…
I had no idea what am and pm is until I moved to the UK
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 1:50 PM
If you were applying logic here then you would know that 12 hour time is just a format and the only real time is 24 hours in a day. That makes "midnight" 00:00 and "noon" 12:00.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 9:00 PM
Easiest way to remember this is that 12:00:01 is clearly the same minute and the same hour. So 12:00:01 AM is the one in the middle of the night, and so is 12:00 AM.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 2:08 AM
How is 1:00 either 1AM or 1PM? How is 2:00 either 2AM or 2PM? How is 3:00 either….
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 3:27 AM
Yep, looks like we’re seeing Unix zero converted to local time (NA Central Daylight?). Not sure where the twenty minutes are coming from though. Maybe that’s a default demo length or something?
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 9:38 PM
Just putting it out there that if you’re still using your Vita, then you might want to look at Henkaku or other CFW options.
I dug out my Vita recently and am amazed that 10yo hardware is still capable of delivering such a good gaming experience. My youngest daughter has taken to it, and it’s wonderful that we’re both getting so much enjoyment out of a console that’s as old as she is.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 7:54 PM
The Unix clock is based on seconds since the Unix epoch, which is the time 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. So these games expired before time zero? The Unix clock wraps around in 2038; I suspect the actual expiration date is past then, but the counter wrapped around. In other words, it’s a programming bug, not an intentional expiration date.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 9:21 PM
Time before zero is just conversion into a local time zone somewhere in the US. The interesting part is the 20 minutes as that can’t be explained by time zone conversion.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 9:26 PM
but the bug is recent though. the article says the epoch date was 1970… but how and when did it get this way. WHEN is important, because apparently these games have always worked before. kind of suspect if the game worked fine before and doesn’t now. sort of indicates something was changed. but what was changed, when was it changed, and who changed it? and why? it doesn’t seem like a programming bug to me, but more like a data entry bug, or even intentional malicious intent.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 3:30 AM
Also a software engineer here, just wanted to emphasize that storing time as seconds (or fractions of seconds) since the Unix epoch isn’t so much a deliberate choice by the console developers but the standard for timekeeping pretty much everywhere and baked into things like security certificates. That’s been a good thing, aside from the year 2038 problem on older systems that didn’t use enough bits.
The epoch date is 7pm Dec 31st 1969 in EST, which means the expiration date value for new downloads is unintentionally being set to zero. This is an extremely common type of bug in software that deals with dates. The extra 20 minutes is probably a "grace period" added to expiration date calculations.
Posted on Apr 10, 2022 | 10:43 PM
but why was it always working before is my question.
if the expiration date has ALWAYS been 1970, then WHY is it broken so specifically **now? the game should never have ever worked.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 3:31 AM
Just a guess, but…
Let’s say the field for "expiration date" is nullable (does not need to be set.) This is used to indicate no expiration date and could seem reasonable from a programming standpoint.
Let’s further guess that the check for an expiration date uses type coercion as part of a true/false check at one point. In some languages, null and 0 will both coerce to false.
Now you have a situation where a bug or invalid entry setting the games expiration times to zero works… until a software update adds an explicit check for null instead of type coercing the value to a boolean.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 4:28 AM
Sweet deal. I have avoided back end my whole life. I hate databases. lol. makes sense though. I can see that happening, as specific as that may be. basically an update that broke it. i can accept that
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 5:14 AM
This is why I would rather have a way of somehow owning my own physical non-drm copy.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 2:56 AM
It’s a f#$*)(& buffer overflow. They wrapped around back to the beginning of epoch time. On purpose or by accident I don’t know.
You wrap your time, and it ends up being -1 or zero again, I.e. Starting back at the beginning of "time as we know it". I.e. epoch time.
Almost sounds like someone tried to do an offset, but forgot that counting starts at 0, not 1, so they were 1 bit over.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 6:24 AM
Can’t wait to see how these digital only consoles age in 20 years. I’m not very hopeful anyone will be able to keep playing their purchased games.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 8:30 AM
And yet my physical copy of ChronoTrigger runs no problem on my SFC.
Posted on Apr 11, 2022 | 12:58 PM
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