Last month, Sony announced that you will no longer be able to purchase games from the PS3, PSP, and PSVita Stores starting on August 27th, 2021. This is a warning sign that service for these consoles will be ending. After this announcement, a Twitter user named Does It Play posted a pdf regarding an issue of what happens if a CMOS battery dies. If you don’t know what a CMOS battery does, it functions as an internal clock. 

To summarize what happens on the PS3 when the CMOS battery dies and it cannot connect to the PlayStation, you will not be able to play any digital games you have downloaded or purchased. This will eventually happen unless Sony does something about it.

What’s worse is what happens to the PS4 when it is presented with the same scenario. Not only will the PS4 be unable to play digital games but physical games as well. So it would be rendered unusable. This will lead to a large amount of unusable PS4’s that will most likely be thrown away; in the process creating a lot of waste. 

The reason you can’t play physical games on a PS4 with a dead CMOS battery is that the PlayStation trophy system relies on the internal clock to make sure that there are no trophy exploits happening. It seems that without the CMOS battery, disc games require a connection to Playstation servers. 

So far it seems that there has been no response from Sony on this issue at the time this article was written. Many people on the internet have expressed their hope of Sony fixing this issue for the sake of preserving older games that are exclusive only to these systems that will be lost to time otherwise.