Unfortunately, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.
Makes me think. I considered Microsoft's decision of killing the used game market with DRM as a sound business choice, but now I realise that Sony's approach is far, far more sensible. Sony and Microsoft sell consoles, not games. They collect licensing fees from game sales, which means it's in their interest to sell new copies of games rather than used, but if they want to be considered as hardware manufacturers in service of the consumer - which they do, only they're not fooling anyone - then it's not their responsibility to put a stop to used game sales. I can sort of imagine that shelves stacked full of second hand console games also contribute to the popularity of the console.
If Sony and MS are going to pretend that they don't care about people selling console games second-hand, then we can probably look to the publishers to recoup the loss. After (or even before) Sony and MS, game publishers suffer the most. One possibility for them to alleviate this is to go to the console manufacturers to ask for implementation of a top-down DRM system, which would be in both parties' financial interest. It would be interesting to know how much say the respective publishers' board members had in this decision. However, it's obvious that consumers aren't simply going to let them get away with this, not without offering some substantial incentives to draw players in
despite the restrictions imposed by the DRM. Steam's the perfect example to look toward here; the most important incentive they gave is the massive discounts. If Microsoft is not willing to do the same (i.e. knock $10 off every one of their $60 games) then no one is going to have a reason to tolerate this massive decrease of flexibility.
So, this might just show what we can expect the future of consoles to look like:
E3 2013, Next Gen and PC's Bizarre Invisibility Problem
Anyway, the other option that publishers have is simply to implement their own software-based DRM with the same functionality, which is an approach we can assume Sony is taking given how they said publishers were going to be able to implement their own form of DRM on the PS4. When given this option on the PC, some publishers attempt to weed out piracy by requiring a constant online connection in order to play. Recent examples are SimCity and Diablo 3 which, depending on how well you tolerate bullshit, also did not provide enough incentives to justify the fact that you get booted out of your game if your connection drops.
Let's hope that this doesn't bring publishers to decide that they actually do want a cut of all those second-hand games in circulation, because if they do, it would be comparatively trivial to implement their own DRM on the newest consoles - plenty of RAM to fit it in, after all - with a much lower chance of it getting cracked. If that happens, I would actually prefer that Microsoft streamlines the DRM by integrating it with their own Live accounts if the alternative is having to manage an EA account, Activision account, Ubisoft account, etcetera...
Also, a member of the Rock Paper Shotgun forum says:
New marketing name: Xbox 180
Author
Topic: The Ultimate Hi Def Next Gen Console thread (internet connection required) (Read 41178 times)