Sony has confirmed, only a day after their conference at E3 2013, that they will not enforce any pre owned DRM, but the decision for third party games will be down to publishers.
CEO Jack Tretton appeared on GTTV and addressed various questions concerning the PS4, and eventually made it to the hot topics pre-owned games, trading and lending. He is quoted in saying, “The DRM decision for third-party games will be up to publishers.”
When asked what would happen if a third party developer / publisher approached the company and said that they wanted to restrict the trading of it’s games, he had this to say,
“We’ve certainly stated that with our first party games we’re not going to be doing that, but we welcome publishers and their business models to our platform.
There’s going to be free-to-play, there’s going to be every potential business model on there, and again that’s up to their relationship with the consumer and whether they think it’s in the best stead, so we’re not going to dictate that, we’re going to give them a platform to publish on.
“The DRM decision is going to have to be in the hands of the third parties, that’s not something we’re going to dictate or control or mandate or implement.”
This is obviously pretty much the opposite to what they said concerning the trading and lending of games, but it’s become clear that that is with their first party titles. It now looks as if a third party developer has the option to make the trading or selling or their game restricted in some way. Which certain levels the scales of the Xbox One vs Playstation 4, even if it’s only by a small margin.
