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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.
It's funny watching my Xbox fanboy friends making ridiculous apologetic statements for Microsoft.
"You have to pay for online access for the PS4 now as well!" As though that's actually a supportive argument for the Xbox One.
"I'm glad there is always-on DRM so that I can download and play my games on other people's consoles while signed in!" As though MS is incapable of making the 24 connection requirement only necessary for digitally purchased games, and allow you to only play disc-purchased games when you have the disc.
"I always have internet, so this isn't a problem for me!" As though Xbox Live has never been down for several days at a time before (or been weird about not letting large numbers of people sign in while others have no problem)
I've never been a Sony fan, and I still don't know if I can trust the company that pulled the rootkit scandal. What I do know is that I am absolutely not going to a be a Microsoft customer this next generation. I will probably get a Wii U to play 1st party Nintendo games, and do the rest of my gaming on PC. Sony still has a shot at convincing me to get a PS4, but Microsoft has already lost me.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
They can, and have in the past, packaged OS updates on game disks. Just saying, it's not as easy to avoid updates as you might imagine.
Time for a reality check: the incredibly vast majority of people don't give a shit about Other OS. It was a sucky move by Sony to remove it, no denying that, but it affected 0.001% of their user base and perhaps put off half of those if not less. They don't give a damn about a few angered /. posters who swore off Sony because they couldn't run Linux on their game consoles.
Their move right now is to capitalize on the bad press Microsoft has received. They're not trying to offset anything, they're trying (and largely succeeding) to win out big time on how terrible the Xbone sounds by giving people exactly what they've always had and wanted to keep. The slides about used games and phoning home were likely added at the last minute as a gigantic jab at Microsoft and wouldn't have made an appearance otherwise.