Why Sony's

On 07/02/2013 at 08:31 AM by Ryan Bunting

I know, I'm late to the party with this - but I've been busy with the show and my currently-in-development love letter to arcade shmups, but all the Sony fanboys were getting massive erections over Sony's supposed "DRM free" PS4.

Now after the whole shit PR fiasco that is Microsoft backpedaled on their DRM practices and used game policies (which are still shit, by the way,) people were still touting Sony as the "winner" of the console reveals, which honestly, is like winning an argument about what happened on last night's episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey - you're still a mouth breathing moron.

The thing people are neglecting to remember (whether it's on purpose or not) is that Sony has stated that they will leave any kind of DRM nonsense up to third parties, so enjoy logging into Origin for all of your EA games, and doubly enjoy logging into UPlay to play your fresh copy of Assassin's Creed 7: Find this guy and kill him then do it 20 more times with other people.

Just because Sony isn't putting their own bullshit into effect, that doesn't mean that big name publishers won't do it. You might be wondering, "If I already have to log in to the Playstation Network, why would I have to log in to a secondary authenticator?" Because publishers don't give a single shit. Cry all you want when you can login to PSN, but can't get into Origin because their servers are run by enslaved children on comically sized hamster wheels - there will be nothing you can do about it, and when you send an angry email to customer support, they'll give you some runaround about "there's no guarantee for server uptime" and "peak hours can cause difficulty logging in" and "our CEO is fisting himself with hundred dollar bills and can't be reached at the moment."

This whole thing went from one fiasco to another, yet the secondary one went unnoticed because everyone was too busy stroking Sony.

As for the Xbox One... I think this about sums it up...

Homelessrook

07/02/2013 at 08:33 AM

See, that is why I am not going next gen. Let us have fun and stay old school.

Ryan Bunting Staff Alumnus

07/02/2013 at 08:37 AM

Exactly - I too, will be abstaining from participating in the next generation of consoles, and I'll remain blissfully with my amazing, physical copies of retro games. Because, you know, physical copies existed back then.

07/02/2013 at 08:40 AM

Do we truly own digital media... Uh no. I am with you.

Anonymous

07/02/2013 at 08:36 AM

Great read, lets also not forget that there is no backwards compatibility on either the PS4 and Xbox One as well and yet oh look the Wii U has no DRM and is Backwards Compatible.

07/02/2013 at 08:38 AM

Yea but the Wii U is still an absolute joke.

XCWarrior

07/02/2013 at 08:41 AM

Based on.. what? Wii U has more retro 8-bit games than any of the other platforms. If you are a fan of this site, you probably should be a fan of the system that has the best backwards compatibility service in this or last generation.

GeminiMan78

07/02/2013 at 08:46 AM

The last human speed bump? lol. Thats one speed bump I actually wouldn't mind running over. As usual I will wait and see who does what, who gets what , and for the price to drop. I still got tons of games to keep me occupied for quite a while.

Ranger1

07/02/2013 at 08:52 AM

Yep, won't be buying into the next gen of consoles, either.

Aboboisdaman

07/02/2013 at 09:32 AM

I don't plan on buying anything next gen. I put a lot of money into this current generation and overall wasn't satisfied with it. Especially if they implement DRM bullshit. What happened to buying a game and actually owning it?

Matt Snee Staff Writer

07/02/2013 at 09:34 AM

I don't think we can get mad at Sony for this -- what choice would they have? They're not supposed to be the defender of gaming rights. The publishers have a lot of pull, and could have told Sony to go fuck themselves had they not allowed something like that, kind of in the way that EA, etc. have totally pulled out of Wii U development.

At least Sony won't be pulling that stuff with 1st party games (apparently, we'll see) which are the only ones I care most about anyway.

I guess we're doomed either way. But I love modern games as much as I like old ones, so I go where the games go.

07/03/2013 at 07:52 AM

I try to enjoy modern games - there's a nice handful of titles on the 360/PS3 that I enjoyed, but the idea of not having physical media upsets me - and I understand that that's the direction that the industry is moving in - and the hard drive for your console of choice will pretty much BE your physical media, but it kind of puts the kibosh on collecting, and on top of that, when the servers go down, those games will be lost forever - it's that long-term rental thing that prevents me every time I even entertain the idea of getting a next gen console.

07/03/2013 at 08:17 AM

it seems like that's the entire direction our society is headed towards, unfortunately, where you don't own things, but you rent them from the overlords. It started out with movies and music and games, all of which are transitioning over to streaming rather than physical media that you own. What could be next? Renting farmland from the king? It's kind of scary.

SanAndreas

07/03/2013 at 11:03 PM

The development of the home computer was one of the great breakthroughs of modern computing, freeing users from the shackles of the mainframe computer and paid "computer time." I guess the overlords of the computing world decided that was too much responsibility for us peasants to handle, because we're being lockstepped towards "cloud computing", which is little different from the mainframes of old in that a corporation holds the keys to the content you paid for, accessed through dumb terminals (now euphemistically called "thin clients".)

Travis Hawks Senior Editor

07/02/2013 at 10:22 AM

Yeah, the secondary log on thing is very annoying. Grappling with that on Far Cry 3, Tiger Woods (review soon!) and others became a huge beating. At least we won't have this step in every game on the new consoles, though. The passable status quo was the most we could hope for from these big pubs, I guess.

Super Step Contributing Writer

07/02/2013 at 11:54 AM

Kind of along the lines of what Snee said, the first-party titles would be what I care about most anyway, but I'm not planning on buying anything at launch, so we'll see just how bad it gets.

07/03/2013 at 07:50 AM

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend buying anything right away - that's how you end up being the one kid that had the TurboGrafx-16.

BrokenH

07/03/2013 at 11:31 AM

I'm not entering this gen until 2-3 years in,Ryan. lol. That is if it hasn't collapsed in on itself by that point.

You're right about sony. Publishers can still decide to put in DRM. The thing is sony couldn't put a stop to that if they wanted to. Even this generation we've had to deal with some of this. In my case if an AAA game has evasive DRM,day 1 dlc, and an "online pass" I will not buy it until it drops in price considerably. That's why I held off on Arkham City despite the fact it was a good game.

However, I've slipped. I remember picking up the most recent Mortal Kombat and I didn't even know it had an online pass. Warner Bros. was more crafty with that one.

My biggest beef with sony right now is because they make you buy a subscription to playstation plus just so you can play multi-player online. They tried to slyly slip that under the radar but I caught it.

Coolsetzer

07/03/2013 at 06:02 PM

Heh. I'm on a wait and see mode. I'm not convinced the Sony will do alright by consumers either. Although I'm sick of hearing about CoD as well. Ah well. I have more than enough games and systems to last me years until they figure it out. lol

07/03/2013 at 11:11 PM

I'm going to go ahead and get a PS4 for Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III, plus a couple of other things, and hope that other neat stuff shows up.

The thing is, I don't think Sony's stunt was quite so BS. To me, it was never implied that Sony would outright ban DRM, as I figured they would fear EA pulling its support, and I do think that Microsoft's DRM was bullshit and needed to be nipped in the bud. While I've no doubt they'll try to go full digital and always online in the next round, at least the kibosh has been put on it for now.

In the 1980s we went from shared computing on dumb clients connected to mainframes to having our own computing power, and it was a revolution. In 2013, they seem to be taking that freedom from us and chaining us back to shared mainframe computing, now known by the euphemism "cloud computing", using shitty thin terminals, which to me is like taking away private telephone lines and putting us back on party lines. Which is also true, in a sense, if Edward Snowden is to be believed. :)

At least in the 1970s your dumb terminal didn't have an always-on camera spying on you.

PixlBit