PS3 and PS Vita owners who have recently gone back to play older games are finding it hard to boot them up. According to reports, players are currently facing issues where certain games on the platforms are coming up as “expired”. Some games affected by this bug include Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI and a few more.
The strange thing about this bug is that these games don’t show a recent expiration date. In fact, the expiration dates on these games took place a very long time ago. Some games have an expiration date of 31 December 1969.
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Users who are facing the issue claim that the error only appeared after they redownloaded the game from their library on the PS3 and PS Vita. The titles are also unplayable on both devices which is also strange. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran claims that he can’t play Chrono Cross (not the remake) on his PS3 due to this 52-year-old expiration date.
Users who are having issues with these games also say they are unable to find the game listings on the PlayStation Store itself. So it seems like Sony might have permanently expired these games when removing them from the PlayStation Store.
At the moment, there seems to be no workaround for this issue. In fact, users have tried everything possible including restoring licenses, resetting their console and even subscribing to PlayStation Plus. Sony has yet to acknowledge the problem.
So did @PlayStation expire the PSOne Classics versions of #ChronoCross and #ChronoTrigger by setting the date on new downloads to 12/31/1969? This is preventing me from playing my purchased copies on Vita and PS3. @ModernVintageG @dark1x pic.twitter.com/wxRebNIZWh
— Christopher Foose (@FooseTV) April 8, 2022
It also doesn’t seem to be related to only Square Enix games. Even though the majority of the expiration dates revolve around Square Enix titles, users report other classic games including Gex are unplayable too. The whole situation might have something to do with Sony’s Unix epoch system. This system is related to the time and date devs have to put into their games to designate the console’s life.
