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Sony's PS4 To Have Less Stringent DRM Than Microsoft's Xbox One
Tackhead writes "E3 is turning into Bizarro World this year. Sony has not only promised that the PS4 will support used games without an online connection, they trolled the Xbox folks hard with this Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video. Compounding the silliness, and hot on the heels of the political firestorm surrounding Donglegate, Microsoft went for rape jokes during their Xbox presentation."
Similarly, onyxruby writes "The Verge covers how Sony has crafted policies explicitly to make the PS4 consumer friendly to the public. They make the case that the PS4 will be superior in nearly every way [to the Xbox Next] by not requiring an Internet connection, not restricting used games, supporting indie developers and selling for $100 cheaper than the Xbox One." And if you're interested in the guts rather than the policies or the politics, Hot Hardware has a comparison of the internals of both of these new offerings.
The real problem is, it can change any time. PS4 can become more stringent, and XBox One could become less (well, in theory).
I'm not sure I trust Sony not to be an asshole regarding DRM. It doesn't have that good a track record. It is a good bet the moment the marketing hype dies down, and the stock holders start pressing, they will tighten their DRM.
morcego
My next console will be a PS4. Vote with your money, if the Xbox One sells poorly and the PS4 sells record breaking amounts than the point will get across to the middle managers who come up with this junk.
I got an XBox 360 a few months ago. My first one. I also got 7 games from the used/discount bin and paid less than $50 for them, combined. The system has provided me with hundreds of hours of fun so far, and I know there are lots of other great games awaiting me.
You can wait one, two, even three years and see which way the wind blows for the next generation of consoles. Is the PS4 getting better titles? Is the XBox One as prone to hardware failures as the 360? Did Sony remove features or add DRM to used games? Is either console molesting children?
Wait and see, and your decision will be much easier. Your wallet will also thank you.
In the meantime, play on the current systems.
But as far as I'm aware there's still another platform that offers far higher technical capability, zero DRM, much more flexibility as a media center if that's your thing, and can even be upgraded when parts break or become obsolete. Call me back when the PS4 gets all that, too.
Wouldn't a mandatory software update require an internet connection? Can't really mandate an update if I don't connect it to the network.
New games could have a firmware update embedded and force you to update the system in order to play it (the Wii did something similar, although it just installed middleware -- think drivers and extra APIs -- that the game can use to interact with the hardware). The online store can refuse connections if you don't have the update, matchmaking servers can refuse service. It might encourage you to pair up your phone or tablet to it for some neat feature, and enable tethering. New Blu-Ray movies can be required, as part of the terms to license the logo and compatibility marks, to have a few tracks set aside for just-in-case-he-runs-it-on-a-PS4. The damn thing isn't even out yet, there could yet be some kind self-expiring key with a requirement to phone home once a year that we don't know about yet.
Hell, with how advanced consoles are these days, they could even embed firmware updates in hardware accessories. Buy a new controller? Plug it in, it mounts the internal flash, updates the system.
Sure this is conjecture and it might be possible for a dedicated person to avoid updating, but they're going to be working off a reduced feature set until they do.
As much as Sony wants to play up the idea that the PS4 is an island onto itself so you can enjoy entertainment on your terms, those days are long gone. Ultimately, as with any closed source anything, you have no way to know what it wants to do and, ultimately, you don't own the hardware.
More Twoson than Cupertino
True, but the only reason they removed it is because people used it to pirate games.
So, your reasoning is that if Sony modifies their supposedly more open system to make it more closed after launch to fight piracy,
then we should not worry about Sony modifying their supposedly more open system to make it more closed after launch to fight piracy?
Well, A.C. at least you have maintained the reputation of your noble collective name.
Microsoft: Surprisingly good on the games front, with Forza looking fairly neat and a good number of titles to announce. Elsewhere it felt like damage limitation. They'd realised by now that people hate the call-home and used-game restrictions and were desperately trying to show that it wasn't as bad as people had assumed. Might have been more convincing if it felt like they even understood it themselves.
Sony: Actually, a surprisingly glitchy presentation in many ways. Some of the game demonstrations were pretty poor and unpolished. However, none of that matters. They picked the wrong music for the section of their presentation that talked about the PS4 itself; they should have gone with The Rains of Castamere. Sony's presentation was the Red Wedding with Microsoft as the Starks. And oh my word it worked. They've been trolling Microsoft into going down the anti-consumer route for more than a year, hinting that they were going to do the same. Yesterday, they sprang the trap. They clearly enjoyed their own presentation and, to be fair, they deserved to.
Nintendo: The weakest of the three. Their big announcement was... delays! Lots of delays. A very thin holiday season, supported by a 3d Mario Game that looks like a rushed, resolution upscaled DS game, a remake of a decade-old Zelda game and a Donkey Kong that nobody seemed to be particularly excited about. Things are a little better over on the 3DS front, but Nintendo were sending off a definite message that they're struggling to keep up.
And predictions based on that?
Sony probably have the Christmas season sewn up. Barring an RROD-level fiasco, they'll go into the first few weeks of sales with a massive stock of consumer enthusiasm. This is a very different Sony to the one that did the cack-handed launch of the PS3.
Microsoft need an urgent rethink. Their current strategy looks set to see them take a significant but nevertheless declining share of the US market (consumer loyalty being a significant factor), but completely abandon Asia and - more shockingly - probably get annihilated in Europe and the emerging markets as well. They've invested a shitload of money to get the marketshare they currently have in the home console market, so don't rule them out yet, but unless they revisit some of their fundamentals over the next 6 months, they could face disaster.
And I suspect Nintendo may already be starting to plan for a post-Wii-U world, where they focus on the handheld business going forward while they decide whether to have another throw of the dice in the home console market or go another direction. The speculation had been that Nintendo's big throw of the dice would be this Christmas, when they'd throw game releases and massive price cuts at the Wii-U to snatch the rug out from under the XB-One and the PS4. In theory they could still do the price cuts, but it's clear now that they don't have the games lineup in position to make that strategy work.
Choosing what products to buy based on which one has the fewest deplorable anti-features rather than best actual features. Great.