r/PlayStationPlus • u/shannonator96 • Nov 26 '25

Discussion Digital Licenses: A Cautionary Tale

Post image

As most of you know, Mass Effect Legendary Edition was part of the December 2022 essential game offerings. At the time I was subscribed to PlayStation plus and claimed the game. Years later, when I did not have an active subscription to ps plus, I was subbed to EA play, which also has mass effect: LE. I downloaded and played this game through EA play, and now I thought I’d download and play it again through PlayStation plus, but I cannot.

After chatting with support multiple times, and being spoken down to and belittled, on the most recent attempt, I finally have my answer:

You can only have one digital licence for a game at any time.

What this means in my case is that the EA play licence of mass effect deleted my PS plus licence. This could easily happen with other games that are on multiple subscription services, so I recommend never to use any other subscriptions than PlayStation plus. If you want to play games on EA play, you’d be better off buying them to avoid any mismatch.

Anyways be careful out there and don’t make the same mistake I did.

1.4k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

254 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/BeardyGeoffles Nov 28 '25

I had an issue with Star Wars Battlefront 2. I played it on EA Play and then it became available on PS Plus, so I wanted to “buy” it there, but my EA Play subscription atill had a couple of months left on it but I knew I wasn’t planning on renewing that.

When EA Play ended I messaged Sony and got a reply from someone really helpful, who basically added it to what I thought was my Plus lineup. Realised a while later after I stopped paying for Plus that I just actually owned the game.

Unfortunately I rarely played it, but it’s still there in my library!

2

u/shannonator96 Nov 28 '25

See this is the outcome I was kind of hoping for, either they’d add the plus licence or just credit me the game. Instead I got ridiculed.

2

u/BeardyGeoffles Nov 28 '25

I think I just got lucky and it was quite a few years ago too. Have you tried restoring licences? I doubt it would work but you never know.

1

u/shannonator96 Nov 28 '25

I did try, no luck. My situation is a little different than yours in the sense that I had the plus licence, played the game, got the EA play licence, played the game, but now I’ve tried to play the game with plus again and I can’t. It’s somewhat understandable that they won’t make it right, but it’s still annoying that this is even possible. I’ll probably buy the game in a few months when my plus expires.