Sony is quietly testing PS Store cashback - and it's not a discount, it's a leash

Nobody at Sony announced anything. People just started posting screenshots: buy a certain game on the PlayStation Store and a message pops up saying the purchase 'includes wallet credit', with the offer running until 29 September. Reddit spotted it first, Eurogamer picked it up, and the titles named so far include The Blood of Dawnwalker (both the Standard and Eclipse editions) and Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. Reports put the bonus at roughly ten dollars, and so far it seems limited to the US store, with some UK accounts seeing it and others not - which smells like an A/B test rather than a launch.

I checked the store here. Nothing. So for now this is a story about what might come, not what you can grab tonight.

But it's worth thinking about before it arrives, because the framing matters. Ten dollars back on a seventy-dollar game sounds like a discount. It isn't. A discount leaves money in your pocket. Wallet credit leaves money in Sony's pocket with your name on it - you can only spend it in the same store, on the same console, where Sony sets the prices. It's the loyalty-card trick from the supermarket, except the supermarket is the only shop in town for PS5 owners.

And that's exactly why it lands differently here than in the US. In our region a big chunk of players still buy on disc, precisely because the disc is the only 'cashback' that has ever worked reliably: finish the game, sell it on, get 30-40 euros back, or lend it to a mate for nothing. A ten-euro credit that has to be spent on more digital games is a much weaker deal than that, and it only looks generous if you've already given up on physical. Which, with Sony planning to wind down disc production after 2028, is clearly the direction they'd like us to head.

Don't get me wrong - if this shows up on the EU store on a game I was buying anyway, I'll take the credit. Free money is free money, even when it's on a leash. What I'd push back on is the idea that this replaces a real price cut, a used market, or the PlayStation Stars programme Sony shut down not long ago. Those gave you something outside the store. This gives you a reason to come back to it.

The smart move for now: if you're eyeing one of these games, wait a week or two and see whether the offer reaches EU accounts before you pay full price. And if it does, remember to ask the only question that counts - is the game plus credit still cheaper than the disc you can resell?

Image: Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Playstation_Dualsense_controller.jpg