Always-On Rumors True? Xbox May Follow Suit in Blocking Used Games

Now that Sony’s PlayStation team is a couple weeks out from what I think will be the PlayStation 4 reveal, It looks like it’s Microsoft’s turn to continue churning the rumor mill.  A while ago you’ll remember that we talked about rumors of the PlayStation 4 having a mechanism to block used games or games not registered to a user from running on the console.  And I’m pretty sure consensus across most people was that it would be a horrible idea.  And in my opinion, that consensus was right.

Now comes the fun part – We knew Sony wasn’t alone in having this technology, but now there’s evidence that it may actually be put into practice.  Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox 720, or Durango, or whatever the hell you want to call it, will be featuring similar technology for the purposes of blocking used games.  While a lot of what I’m seeing across the internet are really just referencing this as rumor, Edge Magazine claims to have a source at Microsoft saying that this will be done by requiring an internet connection to even function.  They went on to mention that games would still be available to be purchased on physical disk media, but those disks could include activation keys, providing nothing to anyone outside of the initial user that bought the media.

The report also says that the system will finally support Blu-ray discs instead after finally giving up on their horse named HD-DVD, but I’m not really sure you’re even reading that part.  The always-on rumor kind of trumps it.

I’ve always hated always-on connections as a method of DRM.  Always. I hated it when EA did it on the PS3.  I hated it when Blizzard did it with Diablo III.  And yes, I have even historically hated it with Steam.  Years ago when I refused to use Steam and people said I was nuts because “dude the games are cheaper and it’s soooo much easier,” my concerns were on a higher plane of nerd.  I’ve always considered business models that require always-on connections to have heavily detrimental aspects to the user experience – most prominently being the one that says No, you can’t play any time you want to.  And Steam did exactly that.  They did it with software instead of hardware so it might be slightly different to the minds of many but the principle remains the same.  And in my opinion, while sure it was cheaper and easier, it was setting a dangerous precedent in gaming.  Not only because it did in fact take something away from the user experience, but that gamers were ok with it, and allowed it to keep happening.  There shouldn’t be any rule on any console or system that says you can’t play the games you’ve paid for when the internet is down.  It adds another point of potential failure to your gaming console in your internet connection.

I might add, before you all go off on me, that I don’t include MMO’s in this little rant.  I mean the “O” stands for online.

In addition to all of this philosophical wrong,  if these reports from Edge are true then it’s a fantastic blow to the used game market, which as we discussed before with the PS4 would in fact help developers since they’d be the only shop in town. What this does do though, if true, is give Sony a tremendous opportunity to say “No, we’re not going to follow that model – come to team Sony, my peoples!”   They have the option to become the console of the people by abandoning this practice before their PS4 reveal.

Truth be told, I really hope Edge is wrong, or that someone lied to them in an extremely convincing manner.  Either way, I’ll keep you posted.  I am not going to call this 100% fact until I hear something official from the Xbox team.

If they’re not hiding from us.

Does Sony's PS4 Sound the Death Knell for the Used Games Market?

When I was younger, maybe back in college or so, video games were sometimes a little cost prohibitive to buy.  $50-$60 bucks a pop for games for our favorite consoles was a little steep for us that had an income of roughly nil accompanied with tens of thousands of dollars in debt to repay when we were done our fancy book learnin'.  Doubly so for a house of nerds that decided that they could run a game review site without time and without money.  So sometimes we would rent, sometimes we would borrow, and sometimes we would buy used to save money whenever stuff went on sale.  Granted for PC games we couldn't really do that (those had, well, different methods of acquisition) but for consoles it was no issue - we grabbed the disc, popped it in our Xbox or PS2 and when we turned it on it worked.  Scratched media excluded, there were never really any issues.

But selling those copies back for store credit and having someone else pick it up used doesn't make publishers happy.  It's money they could have had with a new sale that they've lost, and at the same time it creates a big market that they can't get their hands in at all.  So now it was time for them to get creative.  These days in our digital age,  with the popularity of DLC for content delivery and online play, publishers are more than ready and able to do a lot of things digitally to pick up additional revenue streams.  Let me give you an example - I own a copy of Dead Or Alive 5.  If I get bored of it and sell it to a shop or to a friend of mine (let's call him Sven), that money goes to me, and not Tecmo.  So they added a little hook in the pricing model.  My new copy came with a key that allows me to play online.  But that code links itself to my Xbox Live ID.  So having bought my copy, Sven now has to pay for an online pass to play DOA5 to link to his Xbox Live ID.  See what Tecmo did there?  They put a method in place so that someone buying the game used still had to pay for certain elements of the game.  And in this case it's the online pass.  And Sven might even go on to buy some of the DLC character costumes, so look at that!  Money Tecmo made on a used game where they would have made none before.

original comic here from Penny Arcade

So what's the next step in how publishers can monetize used games?  There could be other methods like the one above that could help publishers extract money from the used games market.  But then there are also more extreme options... like trying to kill used games outright.  Recently on the NeoGAF forums, we found that the legal eagles at Sony filed a very interesting patent (which you can see here) regarding console games and rights.  When it broke, the news of this patent application was received so poorly that GameStop's stock price actually dropped on the day, with GameStop shareholders selling like mad out of fear of losing one of their core businesses.  Funny thing, the internet.

Don't worry kids, you don't have to read through that ridiculous amount of text.  I'm here to do that for you - and strangely actually kind of like reading patents.

The patent more or less states that this technology would lock a disc to a specific player ID, the same way my DOA5 online pass has a lock to my Xbox Live ID.  If this goes through and is implemented in the PlayStation 4, then a disc, once authorized to a single player, wouldn't be able to be played by another player, nullifying any value it potentially had in a used games market or sale.  How would they do it?  The console would write info to a designated blank part of the game disc, putting that link on there.  It may sound pretty Spartan in its method, but it's not really a stretch, seeing as that's how most digitally delivered games work these days.  Just take a look at Steam's model.

But does this mean that they're actually going to use it?  It's true, applying this technology to the PS4 would indeed lock out a used games market, but there were also rumors that Microsoft was talking about doing something similar a while ago with Project Durango (or Infinity, or 720, or whatever).  A lot of companies file for patents that they don't actually implement.  And I have to believe that they know implementing this would shoot themselves in the foot, and they would be giving up more benefits than they would be getting gains, including but not limited to a ridiculous fan backlash.

The whole thing adds a bit more murk to the waters of DRM and used games, especially when an increasing percentage of software doesn't actually exist on physical media.  But one thing I will admit, Sony's come a long way on their protection technology from being able to be beaten by scotch tape and Sharpie markers.