Official PlayStation Podcast 367: Play Has No Limits

Could we get some information about trying to migrate PSN accounts to another country? I contacted support, they just told me to comment on the official blog, which… doesn’t seem like a very efficient way to get a message across, but here we are. With the arrival of the PS5 Digital console, there’s more reason than ever to have more control over how we interact with our digital game library, and how we can keep it with us in the longterm (the ‘value’ of digital game sales seems to necessitate that). Over the last generation, I’ve bought a lot of PS4 games, not knowing that I would end up moving to another country years later, but now, because I can’t migrate my account, I’m locked out of using the store with my bank card (extra frustrating that I’m still in Region 1 and that doesn’t matter, since apparently Playstation’s internal ‘regions’ are different).

Of course, I can make a second account, and login to the old one for games I’ve already bought, and buy new ones on the account tied to my new country, but that’s not only generally and added hassle, but I can’t ever purchase DLC for those games, access my online saves for those games, it adds a whole other account to keep secure (which of course is another phone number and another email address), and what if publishers decide to offer paid cross-gen upgrades?

And what if Playstation does decide to address this – a second account means I’ll have games purchased across two accounts that I now can’t merge, so that’s also not a longterm strategy. And it’s not like this is impossible – the Xbox allows for it, you just have to agree that some content might not be available in your new location. As it is now, I feel like I can’t buy any new games, at all, on either account – if this issue is addressed, the new games will be locked out, and if it’s not, the old games are frozen in a dead international account forever. I feel like Playstation is penalizing accounts that have used the digital store instead of buying discs, and not addressing this before launching the PS5 Digital seems like this is going to be a problem for a lot of other players (and even if I HAD bought all of these on disc, I still couldn’t put them on the PS5 digital).

If play truly has no limits, maybe it’s time for accounts to have no borders. And it’d sure be nice to play buy some games this summer.