A follow-up to Sony's Monopoly Fine Gets Paid In Monopoly Money Back in May I wrote about Sony getting preliminary approval on a $7.85 million settlement for allegedly monopolizing the PlayStation digital games market, and how the "compensation" was store credit redeemable only in the store they were accused of monopolizing. At the time we didn't have real numbers — just an estimated 4.4 million eligible accounts and a settlement total to divide up. Sony has now filled in the blanks, and the numbers are exactly as underwhelming as you'd expect. The Actual Math 4,407,533 accounts. Lawyers taking up to 25% in fees, plus expenses, plus $30,000 apiece for the three named plaintiffs, plus administration costs. What's left to actually distribute: roughly $5.89 million. Lead counsel Michael Buchanan says individual payouts will land somewhere between $0.91 and $33.66 in PlayStation Store credit, prorated by how many qualifying purchases you made relative to everyone else in the pool. Read that eligibility bar closely, too, because it's narrower than "bought a digital game in the window." You only qualify if the specific title had a retail download voucher available before April 1, 2019, that voucher saw at least 200 redemptions, and the game's price went up by 50 cents or more after Sony killed the voucher program. Sony's provided a fixed list — The Last of Us Remastered, Bloodborne, Until Dawn, plus third-party titles like No Man's Sky and NBA 2K18. Everything else you bought digitally in that four-year window, no matter how much of it, doesn't count toward a dime. None of this moves until Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín grants final approval at a fairness hearing on October 15, assuming nobody appeals. So the actual credit — the $0.91, if that's your number — is still a month out at minimum, for a case first filed back in May 2021. Meanwhile, Tomorrow I can't not point out the timing. Marvel's Wolverine — Insomniac's PS5 exclusive, built with zero pretense of a PC release, standalone $69.99, Digital Deluxe $79.99 — launches tomorrow, September 15. It is, by every account, the platform's biggest single-player release of the year, arriving two months ahead of GTA VI specifically so it doesn't have to share a news cycle with it. Sony's already sold you a $649.99 PS5, they'll happily sell you the $69.99 game to go with it, and somewhere in your account there may eventually appear ninety-one cents of Store credit as a gesture of contrition for the last time they cornered this exact market. You could, in theory, apply it toward the purchase. It would cover roughly 1.3% of the transaction. This is the same closed loop I flagged the first time around: Sony settles a case about controlling the only place you can spend money on PlayStation digital games by paying you in currency that only works in the place they controlled. The circle doesn't just close, it profits on the way back around, because tomorrow they're also selling you the thing the credit is meant to be redeemed against. The Bigger Picture Hasn't Moved Worth restating what settling doesn't change: Sony isn't bringing retail vouchers back, the PlayStation Store remains the sole source for digital PlayStation games, and this settlement is explicitly not an admission of wrongdoing. Meanwhile the UK case — same core allegation, brought on behalf of roughly 12 million consumers, valued at $2.7 billion — went to trial at the Competition Appeal Tribunal this spring and is still awaiting judgment. Twelve million users against $2.7 billion works out to about $225 a head, in an actual currency, if it lands. Compare that to $0.91 in Store credit and you're looking at the same structural gap I wrote about in May: US settlements are sized to be survivable, UK and EU judgments are sized to actually hurt. And this is all landing in the same calendar year as the disc cutoff announcement — physical PlayStation disc production ending January 2028, no more retail vouchers because there's increasingly no retail product left to attach one to. The settlement is about a market Sony already finished closing. The credit shows up, if it shows up at all, into a storefront that by 2028 will be the only place any of this exists. Some people took that disc announcement personally enough to swear off Sony indefinitely until they reverse it. I already made my case on why I don't think that holds — Sony's own CFO has told investors the backlash isn't showing up anywhere that matters, and the real test isn't now, it's November, when GTA VI shows up and asks everyone how much that principle is actually worth. This settlement is just more of the same evidence: Sony knows exactly how little pressure it's under, on either front. Go enjoy Wolverine tomorrow if that's your thing — Insomniac's earned some benefit of the doubt after the Spider-Man games. Just don't mistake the ninety-one cents for anything other than what it is: a receipt, mailed four years late, for a transaction you already lost. Got thoughts? Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series, filed under Insert Coin.