Cannot launch Need For Speed Deluxe Edition

[Virtually-Nick]

My son recently purchased Need for Speed Deluxe Edition through the Playstation Store.

And what a bummer, he couldn't play the game, getting a wonderfully vague message that EA servers could not be contacted ...

We have the PS4 set up with family accounts, where my account is the 'manager' account, and my son has a secondary account with restrictions for age, etc.  I investigated, initially with the idea that the issue had to do with age limits.  I repeatedly raised the age limit for his PSN account, as well as activating the additonal settings for other players chats & content.  All to no avail.

We then tested with my account, which also didn't work.
Based on further searching it became apparent that an EA account is required to play the game (how easy would it be to include this as a start-up message or pre-requisite).  We created an EA account for me, and everything started moving.  Hooray ...!

But, of course, it's my son's game and he would like to play it under his own PSN account.

So we embarked on a voyage of creating an EA account for him.
Net result:  no way ...
Clearly something to do with his age, and some stupid reasoning behind that.  I can always get around it by faking his age, but that kind of goes against my principles.

Please help.

This also cannot be a network issue, otherwise I wouldn't be able to play the game under my account - so please don't raise suggestions of resetting the router and/or PS4.

Thank you for your trouble.

[EA_Barry]

@Virtually-Nick 

Accounts under thirteen years of age cannot play online. If you wish to allow your child to play online, the easiest way is to let them use your account.

We have a help article regarding the setup of child accounts here: 

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/account/set-up-child-ea-account/

[Virtually-Nick]

@EA_Barry 

Thanks for your response.

This makes for an interesting case, since my son is already 13 (in fact he's 5 months shy of his 15th birthday).  I have created his EA account as a child account, but then I also run into an issue linking his EA account to his PSN account (see attachment).  Furthermore, he is not particularly enthused about only being able to play under my account, anybody with teenage children will understand that this simply is not cool ... 

It's a shame that this game cannot be played in a stand-alone mode, even more so since the PG rating on the game is well within our comfort zone.