Sony Japan has published a formal customer harassment policy on its official PlayStation website, and while these kinds of policies are increasingly common in Japan right now, the timing here is hard to ignore. The company is in the middle of one of its most controversial periods in recent memory, dealing with sustained player fury over its decision to end physical disc production, multiple class action lawsuits across different countries, and a legal argument that has set gaming communities on fire. The harassment policy didn’t appear out of nowhere — it’s the latest sign of just how heated things have gotten.
What Sony’s Customer Harassment Policy Actually Says
Sony published the policy on September 1, 2026, through its Japanese PlayStation support site, framing it as a commitment to both serving customers and protecting its own staff.
“Our company strives to provide honest service so that our customers can use our products and services with peace of mind, and we value customer feedback to improve our services,” the policy reads. “On the other hand, the dignity and safety of our employees must not be threatened by customer harassment.”
Sony says it takes a “firm stance” against such behavior and gives specific examples of what falls under harassment:
- Persistent, repeated, or prolonged demands
- Excessive or unreasonable demands for compensation or apologies
- Abusive language, threats, and slander
- Forcing someone to prostrate themselves (a reference to demanding a full dogeza apology, which comes up specifically in Japanese workplace harassment discussions)
- Visiting offices or related facilities without permission
If any of these behaviors are confirmed, Sony says it reserves the right to restrict or suspend customer service for the offending individual — and if necessary, involve “police, lawyers, etc.” to pursue legal action or criminal proceedings.
This Is Part of a Broader Shift in Japan’s Workplace Culture
Sony isn’t doing this in a vacuum. Japan has historically operated under an extreme customer-first culture — the phrase okyaku-sama wa kami-sama desu (“the customer is god”) has shaped service industry norms there for decades. That’s been changing rapidly, and the law is now catching up.
In June 2025, Japan’s parliament amended the Comprehensive Labour Policy Act to make protecting workers from customer harassment a legal obligation for all employers. The new rules — known informally as Japan’s “Kasu-hara” (customer harassment) law — came into full force on October 1, 2026. Under these guidelines, every employer in Japan must publish a clear policy defending staff, set up complaint channels, avoid leaving employees alone with abusers, and if necessary, ban offending customers or call the police.
Tokyo had already moved ahead of the national law, with the Tokyo Customer Harassment Prevention Ordinance taking effect in April 2025. The national legislation followed that momentum. A 2024 survey of roughly 33,000 retail and service workers by Japan’s largest private-sector union found that nearly 47% had faced harassment from a customer in the previous two years.
Sony is one of many Japanese companies rolling out these policies in response — but the context surrounding its specific announcement gives it significantly more weight than a routine compliance update.
Why the Timing Matters: Sony’s Ongoing Disc Controversy
On July 1, 2026, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced it would stop manufacturing physical game discs for PlayStation starting January 2028. The reaction was swift and severe. Players who rely on physical media for ownership, resale, lending, and access in regions with poor internet infrastructure flooded social media and every PlayStation post with anger. Petitions racked up hundreds of thousands of signatures. Even within the industry, some developers signaled discomfort with Sony’s direction at events like gamescom 2026.
That backlash has clearly escalated beyond online complaints and into the kind of direct, targeted harassment that requires a formal policy response. Sony’s employees — customer support staff in particular — have been on the receiving end of anger that goes well beyond strongly-worded feedback.
The company’s own chief financial officer Lin Tao acknowledged the intensity of the reaction, saying Sony recognizes the “strong views” players hold on the disc decision, but insisting it will “cautiously move this forward” regardless. That message — we hear you, we’re doing it anyway — hasn’t gone over well, and the employee-level consequences of that corporate stance are now being addressed through this harassment policy.
The Lawsuits Piling Up Against Sony
Beyond the disc announcement itself, Sony’s legal situation has become increasingly complicated in recent months, and each development has added more fuel to the fire.
The California Class Action Over Digital Ownership
A class action lawsuit was filed against Sony in California’s Northern District Court on June 18, 2026, alleging that the PlayStation Store violates California’s AB 2426 law — a 2024 statute requiring sellers to clearly disclose that buying a digital game is a license purchase, not ownership. The plaintiffs argued that Sony’s “Buy Now” and “Confirm Purchase” buttons imply ownership, while the actual licensing language is buried hundreds of words deep in documents linked but not displayed at checkout.
Sony’s August 21 response to this lawsuit has since become one of the most talked-about gaming industry legal filings in recent memory. In it, Sony argued that “it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining ‘ownership’ of a digital game.” The company went further, claiming that digital ownership is logically impossible — because if one player “owned” a game, Sony would be unable to sell it to anyone else.
That argument landed badly. Coming two months after the disc announcement, the framing that players should already know they don’t own what they bought reads as tone-deaf at best. It also directly conflicts with how Sony itself describes these transactions — using “Buy,” “Purchase,” and “Own” throughout its storefront — though Sony’s lawyers pointed to the Software Product License Agreement, which states plainly that “The Software is licensed to you, not sold.”
We covered the full breakdown of this lawsuit and Sony’s legal argument in detail in our earlier piece on the PlayStation digital ownership lawsuit.
The $457 Million Dutch Lawsuit
In the Netherlands, a Dutch consumer group — Stichting Massaschade & Consument — filed a €457 million lawsuit on behalf of 1.7 million Dutch PlayStation users. Stop Killing Games has since joined this lawsuit. The claim alleges that Sony charged Dutch customers more on its digital store than buyers in other regions, and that the PlayStation Store’s dominance as the sole digital distribution channel for PlayStation games constitutes a monopoly that artificially inflates game prices.
The Mexico Antitrust Case
Mexican lawmakers have also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Sony, arguing that restricting game purchases to the PlayStation digital storefront — particularly after the end of physical disc production — constitutes anti-competitive practice that shuts out retail competition entirely. The legal logic here is straightforward: if you can only buy PlayStation games through Sony’s own store, Sony effectively controls 100% of the market for its own platform and can set prices accordingly.
There’s also an ongoing UK class action seeking roughly £1.97 billion in damages from PlayStation users over a decade of purchases, adding to what has become a genuinely global legal front for Sony to manage simultaneously.
What This All Means for Players
Sony’s harassment policy is legitimate and reflects both Japanese legal requirements and a real problem with how some players have been treating customer support staff. Nobody should be threatening or abusing employees over corporate decisions they didn’t personally make. That part is straightforward.
But the policy exists within a context that Sony itself has created. The disc announcement, the legal argument that players should know they don’t own their games, and the company’s continued push toward an all-digital future with its digital store as the only purchase channel — all of this has generated the exact kind of anger that eventually spills over into how people treat customer-facing staff.
The gaming industry is navigating a genuinely complicated moment around what digital ownership means and what platforms owe their users. Sony’s situation is the sharpest edge of that conversation right now, but it connects to broader questions about platform power and consumer rights that are playing out across the industry. It’s a tension that other platforms and publishers are watching closely — from how companies add premium perks like Twitch’s GIF feature for higher-tier subscribers to how major releases like GTA 6 are handling monetization decisions in ways that try to avoid exactly this kind of blowback.
Sony has made clear it isn’t reversing the disc decision. The harassment policy will protect its staff, which is the right thing to do. But the underlying reasons that policy was necessary are unlikely to go away until the company gives players something more than “we’re moving forward cautiously” on the questions that actually matter to them.
