The cost of doing that would likely be orders of magnitude more than just keeping an NTP server operating for a couple of decades.

No QA required: worst case is a different colored brick.

You mean commenting out a line of code, bumping the version and building a firmware image would cost a lot?

They should have thought about that and planned for it when designing the software

Does the PS3 work with IPv6? If so, you are probably right.

But what about people who play time-limited PS3 games after their authorized expiration date! Won't someone think of the software companies?

I wonder how far out the expiration dates are? Surely they must all expire within a year or two? Can you get a time-limited game and say you want it for 50 years?

If Sony can't hold up their end of the deal with software license holders, then they need to work out a deal with the software company. It shouldn't involve end users at all.

It could be argued that this would be mandated by a right-to-repair law.

Then you need to keep the update server alive for a long time.

Or make the update available for download to install via usb drive.

Is that something that can be done now, or would that too require a firmware update to introduce that feature?

You can do it now:

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps3/syste...