Sony is trying all it can to combat used sales of PS Vita games. A few SCEA-published titles are already rocking online passes, but there’s a more insidious trick that I didn’t even know existed — Vita carts that save data to themselves will latch onto one PSN account and won’t unlock Trophies for anybody else.
Fortunately, the folks at Pocket Gamer already found a way to sidestep this stupidity. If you care about Trophies and don’t want to buy all your Vita games new, here’s what to do:
- Click “No” when you get the warning message telling you that you can’t earn Trophies with the current application.
- Touch and hold the Vita home screen until you can rearrange icons. Press the “…” bubble attached to the icon of the game you want to play. Choose to format the card, which will wipe the data on it.
- If you get the message warning you that the data shall be deleted, you should be golden. Boot up the game and it’ll now be tethered to your account.
Doing this won’t undo the Trophy progress of the previous owner, so nobody’s being screwed in the process, apart from maybe Sony, if used games were its target here, which some people don’t think was the plan, the alternative, however, is that Sony made this system needlessly convoluted and complex accidentally and … I have more respect for Sony than to think it would do a dumb thing without at least a dumb reason for it.
