There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can't make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don't sell digital.

That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!

But even if we assume they shouldn't sell digital it doesn't explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed "oh shit" moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should've changed by now.

Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.

I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.

I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.

FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.

Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.