A peripheral company selling custom PS5 faceplates has been forced to cancel all its orders and pull the products from sale, following reported legal action from Sony.
PlateStation5.com had already been forced to rebrand to CustomizeMyPlates.com following a complaint from Sony earlier this week, but now the seller claims that subsequent threats to go to court over the custom faceplates have forced it to stop selling the product entirely.
“Before we launched, we did our due diligence and were of the opinion, that because Sony only had pending patents on the faceplates there would be no problem,” CustomizeMyPlates told VGC via e-mail.
“But after only a day of our website being live, Sony’s lawyers asked us to change our name (at the time PlateStation5), due to trademark infringements. We thought this switch would be enough to keep everyone happy, and honestly were hoping so since we were already underway with our product development.
“But then Sony’s lawyers told us it was their opinion, Sony’s intellectual property extended to the faceplates, and that if we continued to sell and distribute them in any country, we would end up in court.”
It added: “This all came to light yesterday and we are now cancelling and refunding all faceplate orders worldwide… we are extremely disappointed about this but we have no other option.”
The firm said that moving forward it would be “wiser” on trademark and patent laws and focus on offering legal console skins and other products.
The UK-based company was taking orders for the unofficial PS5 shells in a variety of colours for $39.99 / £32 and said it hoped to ship them to customers within two weeks of the console’s launch date.
The company said it was working with manufacturers in the UK and China to create the faceplates, which were claimed to be made from “premium industry standard plastic” based on the PS5’s officially released dimensions.
As revealed in an official PlayStation 5 teardown video last month, PS5’s standard white shell snaps off, theoretically allowing the unofficial replicas to be easily inserted in its place.
Sony has yet to announce any variation from PlayStation 5’s standard white design or even commit to releasing additional console shells in the future.
Images showing a black PS5 DualSense controller were recently published by the United States’ Federal Communications Commission. However, this variation is likely intended for a development kit.
The PS5 release date is November 12 in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, with the rest of the world getting the console on November 19.
However, the release date for PS5 accessories was recently brought forward to October 30 in the US, and to November 12 in the UK.
