I and many other people worldwide are now breathing a collective sigh of relief due to an announcement posted today on Engadget.com . There has been a rumor floating around for some time about the possibility of creating copy-protected discs that would be playable only on the initial machine. In other words, once you played the game on your PS3, it would be unplayable on any other person's machine. This could possibly be the stupidest thing possible for any company to do, since it would effectively kill any used games market, as well as make it impossible for a kid (or adult) to simply take the game to someone else's house to play it together. It would almost certainly sink the Playstation as a contender in the video game machine market, because who wants to buy a system when you can't share and sell its games? What if you buy a game and hate it? You'd be stuck with it, because you wouldn't be able to sell it...
This rumor started mainly because the word got out that Sony has been working on technology to make this single-system copy protection possible. With the launch date for the PS3 looming nearer and nearer, someone made the leap in logic that this process was going to be used on the PS3. I first saw it in Game Informer magazine, so it really did have a lot of people scared, even in the gaming industry.
Swing and a miss, though, because Sony has now officially confirmed that this isn't going to happen, at least not on the PS3...my guess is they're working on it to copy protect DVDs, or something like that, in an effort to halt piracy. Still, it's something I hope we won't see, because sharing multimedia is half the fun of having it.
No comments:
Post a Comment