My guy, you are literally saying this is a "non-story", a "Boogeyman", a "minor anti-piracy thing" in this very thread.

Which is a thing they don't do, Nintendo only tackles on Switch piracy, and they're on their right to do so. My personal views on piracy is that I don't care if someone does it or not, but it objectively *does* hurt sales of modern games (which yes, it is a thing that piracy advocates claim that it doesn't happen), and game companies are in their right to fight against it. Having to online check every new game for 30 days is still not great.

I am, most aren't.  Your view seemed to be the forum is giving Sony a pass, most aren't.  The forum shouldn't be held to my personal thoughts.  

either way, feels like we are mostly aligned.  Anti-piracy is fair by all companies, the check-in isn't great, but not a huge deal.

Very weird decision.
This will cause a decline in PS5 sales. Who cares? ;)

Really?  You think the average gamer will even know?  Those who know probably already have a ps5.  The price increase will hurt sales 1000x more than this.

You only have to check it once.

Apparently it happens in the 15h day after purchase, the game will be issued a 14 days license which, without needing internet connection later, will automatically turn into a permanent license on the system into the 15th day.

You don't need to check games for 30 days, just once.

The period is 14 days because that is the refund period for digital games, which was being sploited via support chat by jailbroken PS4s.

It's still not optimal, but it really is not the kind of problem we initially thought it was. There is no constant DRM being applied to games, at all 

IMO, this check needs to happen immediatly after you first launch the game, Sony will hardly every refund a game you have already played (extremely rare exceptions being broken mess launches like Cyberpunk 2077), so if refund will be very rare regardless, downloading the game (you'll need internet for that) and immediatly booting it up should already transition the license status from temporary to permanent, in which case that would be 100% a non issue.

While this change should not have been made, thankfully the awful monthly check-in is not a thing until Sony or someone might implement it in the future. The only time I lose internet are brief connection issues from my device, Wi-Fi, or maybe a 24-hour outage from the internet provider.
I still think online checks are scummy, but this is not as awful as it seemed.

I have no idea what is wrong with the big platform holders. They sell consoles, yet they make the experience so subpar in comparison to PC, at some point most of their customers are going to migrate to Steam, retro, or the seven seas.

can we update the topic/title now that we know this is just for the refund window

1 time check, it's all you need. You have 10 new games in the last 30 days? > 1 single online connection > Done, you don't need New connections.

I see no problem with this.

Imho, this thread should be locked. Rumor was debunked.