Sony has officially confirmed that the PlayStation 4 will be able to play second-hand games after all, after a patent on a method of blocking them and the much enhanced online delivery system of the new console led to much speculation that it would finally axe the used game market with a registration system.
Whilst downloadable titles – seemingly intended as the main delivery method – will of course be at the whim of Sony’s highly reliable servers and not subject to resale or unrestricted transfer, Sony honcho Shuhei Yoshida has confirmed physical copies will be playable without restriction even if previously owned:
[Do you agree that if you buy something on a disc, that you have a kind of moral contract with the person you’ve bought it from that you retain some of that value and you can pass it on?]
“Yes. That’s the general expectation by consumers. They purchase physical form, they want to use it everywhere, right? So that’s my expectation.”
[So if someone buys a PlayStation 4 game, you’re not going to stop them reselling it?]
“Used games can play on PS4.”
Another interview carried a similar confirmation by Yoshida, also seemingly ruling out region locks:
“When you purchase disc-based games for PS4, they will work on any hardware.”
Suspicions that Sony was planning on eliminating the second-hand sales market as a way of reclaiming the billions in revenue it apparently siphons away from game publishers and into the coffers of game retailers flared after it emerged that Sony recently patented a method of blocking used games from functioning, although Sony denies it has anything to do with the PS4.
However, in other comments Yoshida also revealed that publishers will be able to add anti-resale registration schemes to their titles themselves, potentially allowing them to block or discourage resale without any PR hassle for Sony.
they must have learned that heavy restrictions caused their previous consoles to fail…
*COUGH PSVita COUGH*
Will play them for the first year.
Courts have already ruled that just because you purchase a system with certain functionality, doesn’t meed the vendor has to keep the functionality around.
Sony has already done this once with the Linux alternate OS capabilities on the PS-3, there’s no reason to assume they won’t do it again with the PS-4 and used games once the systems saturates the market.
i’ll never understand early adopters that like to pay extra for the privilege of having no games to play and enjoy the risk of getting screwed over a hardware bug, a firmware update or just plain market failure
Shouldn’t that be SONY PATENTED anti-resale registration schemes?
The way I buy PC is to buy a game I WANT to play and then buy the cheapeast PC that can play the game at max specs. I do the same for consoles. Don’t care for the specs since those are always exaggerated by SONY (PS3 cell chip specs for instance).
having a powerful hardware is useless if nobody is able to fully exploit it either because they dont care or because you made your architecture bizarre and unwieldy for whatever crazy reason as the PS3 showed