Sony appears to have added a 30-day DRM check on newly-purchased digital PS5 & PS4 games, with YouTube account Modded Warfare reporting that the implementation of a digital rights management (DRM) came in the latest PS5 system software update.
Purchases that are made on or after around mid-April 2026 now come with a 30-day timer, and during this time if the game isn’t played at all, the player must renew the license and rest the timer by connecting their console online. However, you won’t lose access to your purchase if the 30-day timer expires; rather, you won’t be able to play the game until you connect your console online to renew the license.
According to reports, the timer can only be seen on PS4 but it affects PS5 titles too. Valid Period (Start), Valid Period (End), and Remaining Time info can now be seen when checking the information section on a PS4 title purchase, while on PS5, the player will be notified when the timer runs but cannot actually be seen. It should be noted that the issue doesn’t impact title that have previously been purchased, with a number of players having tested digital purchases made previously and the timer isn’t in effect.
YouTuber Spawn Wave tested things out on a number of purchased games. Two of them were digital games bought prior to the DRM reports, another is a digital copy of Crimson Desert purchased prior to reports, and a physical copy of Pragmata. Each game runs on PS5 without issues regardless of whether it was connected online or not, as the 30-day timer hasn’t expired. He then removed the CMOS battery, which runs the console’s internal clock, resulting in the PS5 simulating the 30-day timer running out as it is unable to check the real date or time without it.
As a result, his version of Crimson Desert and Pragmata continued to work without any problems, as there were no validity checks. However, the other two digital games didn’t work, and were accompanied by the message, “Can’t use this content. Can’t connect to the server to verify your license.”
The obvious worry is that, assuming this is Sony’s new standard going forward, then if the format holder every turns off the PS4 or PS5 servers down the line, then users would have to look other the CMOS to verify their content. This isn’t an issue until the CMOS battery inevitably runs out, after which there is presumably no way to verify digital games purchased after the timers became active.
Modded Warfare offers speculation that Sony may have implemented this measure to combat jailbreaks.
So far there’s not been anything they can do about that because they can’t exactly just take away people’s games. Generally, we cannot reply on these digital games being used as entry points to trigger kernel exploits because once you put your console offline for over 30 days, it will then require a connection to PSN to allow you to run that game.
Sony Interactive Entertainment has yet to issue comment on the matter, but we’ll keep you updated.
[Source – Modded Warfare via VGC]