Sony has forced a shutdown of custom faceplate makers for the PS5 citing intellectual property reasons. The peripheral company which was 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, later rebranded as CustomizeMyPlates.com, is no longer going to sell custom PlayStation 5 faceplates due to legal issues, and it is canceling all orders worldwide.
Speaking with VideoGameChronicles, CustomizeMyPlates.com said that changing the website name from PlateStation5.com was not enough as Sony’s intellectual property extends to the faceplates. Continuing to sell them would have resulted in legal action.
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.
But after only a day of our website is 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.
This all came to light yesterday and we are now canceling and refunding all faceplate orders worldwide… we are extremely disappointed about this but we have no other option.
The UK-based company was taking orders for the unofficial PS5 shells in a variety of colors including V1 Matte Black, Chromatic, Cherry Red, Jungle Camo, and Indigo Blue for $39.99 / £32, and said it hoped to ship them to customers within two weeks of the console’s launch date.
Image Credit: VGC
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.
The plates were supposed to come with full back and front shells and would have been available for both the regular edition and the Digital Edition. This shows that Sony is in no mood to allow anyone to sell custom faceplates for PS5 as this could have meant the end of custom and limited-edition PS5 consoles that Sony might be planning in the future.
