Sony files anti-used game patent

There have been rumours over the past few months around the internet that the upcoming next gen consoles, the XBOX 720 and the PS4/Orbix, will be implemented with features that block used games. And now, those rumours might have just proven themselves true, as Sony has recently filed a patent that blocks used games on the next gen Playstation.

An individual who buys a brand-new game will have the game tied to his/her account. Then, if anyone with a different account tries to boot the cd, they'll only be able to play it with limited access; they'll have to pay an "access fee" to get full access to the game.

If things do turn out this way, it will greatly affect the video game industry, especially the used game market. Companies like Gamestop and EB Games will greatly suffer. Additionally, anyone who relies on purchasing their games from secondhand stores, or is in a budget will have a much more difficult time getting that special game they want.

Although we can't say for sure that this will happen, what do you guys think about this?
Give me your thoughts and opinions :)

You already get limited access with some pre-owened games. You have to buy an online pass to play online, and they usually cost $15 :/


I don't know if the Xbox does the same, but this is a really bad way to **** over your customers. And I think Sony only patented it so they can't be sued if someone else patents it.

I think it's quite unfair. Also, if one's system breaks, they'll have to pay for a new one plus a fee? That's just not right.

Everyday the gaming industry is loosing money due to people who enjoy sharing games (either letting people borrow copies or buying used) and through file sharing (torrenting).
I personally do both and I don't expect anybody to pay full price £35-40 (in the United Kingdom) for the poor quality of most console releases.

The PC now seems to me as the most reliable platform to play games on and the only way they will get people to buy the consoles is to tie with them "exclusive games".

When I was younger I was such a hardcore console gamer, playing on the PlayStation, Xbox, PS2 and then finally the Xbox 360.

Playing on the PS2 was pretty much the golden days of my teenage years. The quality of games were great and console exclusives delivered what they were meant to do. Not build a half ass game and then expect people to be milked of a DLC.
I mean Metal gear solid 1 and 2 were one of my favourite games ever played, along with of course the Pokemon Titles through the various consoles.
They finished games and once you bought the game, you knew it was complete and now it just seems the developers are just getting lazy and not adding in features on purpose then milking the sequel with features lacked or DLC updates.

Now that we have the internet, more and more people are learning to build computers and just torrent games/crack them and play. The argument of whether torrenting is stealing or sharing is a different matter.

Once the 360 came out and the build quality on consoles went down, I knew I was not going to be a console gamer anymore. My Xbox 360 died after 14-16 months of heavy use with the red ring of death, luckily I had an extended warranty and got a new one free of charge. I rarely play my 360 on fear of it just dying on me and all the titles are just the same on PS3 and PC..so I'll just go game on my PC.

Steam is also a big influence with discounted games allowing people to just download from their home and not needing to buy and wait for the game to arrive to them. They have crazy deals on games sometimes which makes it even easier for people to get titles at low prices.

Not to mention the YouTube channel "MinnesotaBurns" has pretty much shown how useless the Xbox Live enforcement team are. The person showing videos of someone hacking/modding in game, share the hackers gamer tag and HE gets banned for sharing information which is against terms and conditions. The hacker in question gets let off scott free. No surprise since they want that money coming in from hackers,modders, boosters for each month of their subscription to Xbox Live.

Xbox Live isn't free and in terms of gaming experience, I've encountered more modders, hackers throughout my time then playing online on the PC (which is...free ?)

I just played Halo 4 recently (blew the dust and cobwebs off my Xbox since it had been collecting dust) and even that was a let down. If game developers can't deliver their exclusive titles to their console, then why bother buying the console in the first place.

This new feature on the consoles will just be shooting themselves in the foot. Forcing people to pay full price for games will only deter consumers and hurt the market of used games. Eventually they will have to sell "new titles" cheaper and the games industry will be loosing just as much, if not more money then they are already loosing now. Some people may not bother with these consoles and just stick to PC due to the lack of being able to use "used games" without limitations.

PC's are killing the console market and why should Microsoft care about this when millions of people all around the world use their software.
Nintendo always have smart ideas to keep themselves ahead of their competitors and Sony will be left in the dust if they don't buck up their ideas.

Not surprised. This rumor has been floating around for a while and it seems to be becoming a reality. What in regards of an obscure game with a short print cycle? You're screwed in that regard. I know Sony will probably try the online distribution thing like Nintendo is doing with games, but not only is my internet connection awful, but games might not ever go down in price, unlike Steam.

The Wii U is the only console I'll be getting for this new generation. For those other games, I'm building a PC instead. Maybe if they're so worried about piracy and used games, they should games good enough to warrant the freaking $60 price tag.

I remember reading about this a few days ago, but I can't remember how I found it or even which website I read the information from.

But I don't like the direction Sony is going with their games. As far as I know, one of the reasons people get interested in purchasing a game is by playing it themselves, whether it's with a friend or not. An example of this is, one of my friends wanted to try out a new game, so he played it at a friends house. After a while he asked them if he could borrow it, and a few days later he purchased it from a local GameStop store.

I also remember reading (I think from GameInformer or some website) that most video game companies prefer that their consumers share their games with others because it can greatly increase their sales.

Still, I can only imagine hackers would be able to get around the block anyways since there seems to always be a way for them.

I don't plan on buying a new console anyways unless I have an absolutely good reason to spend my money on it, or if it goes on sale for a cheap price. Even so, the PS4 would be my only choice since I would never buy a Wii U or XBOX 720.

That's just awful. Thank God I don't play either console.

I get that the world is starting to rely more on the internet, but some people don't necessarily have access to it, which would make it unbearable for some gamers to even buy such a console. Not only that, but tying a CD to a specific console is pretty useless, considering how some games can be sold either digitally or physically. A move like this would pretty much coax players to download the game instead, leaving the CD for dead.

Tl;dr, no. Just no.

It's not going to be tied to the console, it's going to be tied to the persons account.

In England, we have a quite popular pre-owned game store named Cex. I mean, in this situation I'm sure they'll find a way around it, as in deducting the full access price off or just selling it with the full access already on. I know that these kind of stores don't only sell Playstation games; they still sell games on every other console plus used electronic devices.

But, this would probably decrease the amount of Playstation games that are traded-in. Knowing that this is the case with the games now, I'm sure Playstation players will do some looking-up to check if it is a game they really want to buy before regretting it. I think that the true gamers will keep their games no matter what, just the people who need that bit of extra cash might have to go for a low trade-in price.

I'm sure everyone feels the $60 price tage is being casually thrown on every new console game and some don't even deserve 30-40. A good tie-in with this is piracy, and chances are most people who full out disagree/usually buy their games used will either move to microsoft (assuming they don't do the same) and become a 360 gamer or they will become more PC Gaming oriented. I think that this move wasn't a very smart one and very unessisary. I will probably switch to PC gaming as console gaming alltogether is looking really ridiculous to me. If you ask me, all this is warrienting is an invitation for someone to exploit this system. I just don't want gaming to be entirely controlled by the company that produces the consoles and hopefully developers can have a say in how much is restricted in their game. Also the only gaming store within 50 miles of where I live is a Gamestop and I don't think this is going to go well with them.... hopefully not bad enough to make them move....

Aeon said:

Not surprised. This rumor has been floating around for a while and it seems to be becoming a reality. What in regards of an obscure game with a short print cycle? You're screwed in that regard. I know Sony will probably try the online distribution thing like Nintendo is doing with games, but not only is my internet connection awful, but games might not ever go down in price, unlike Steam.

The Wii U is the only console I'll be getting for this new generation. For those other games, I'm building a PC instead. Maybe if they're so worried about piracy and used games, they should games good enough to warrant the freaking $60 price tag.

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Sony already does online distribution for video games. Not all of them but there are quite the handful of games on the store(what's on the stores varies in each region).

dcjboi said:

I'm sure everyone feels the $60 price tage is being casually thrown on every new console game and some don't even deserve 30-40. A good tie-in with this is piracy, and chances are most people who full out disagree/usually buy their games used will either move to microsoft (assuming they don't do the same) and become a 360 gamer or they will become more PC Gaming oriented. I think that this move wasn't a very smart one and very unessisary. I will probably switch to PC gaming as console gaming alltogether is looking really ridiculous to me. If you ask me, all this is warrienting is an invitation for someone to exploit this system. I just don't want gaming to be entirely controlled by the company that produces the consoles and hopefully developers can have a say in how much is restricted in their game. Also the only gaming store within 50 miles of where I live is a Gamestop and I don't think this is going to go well with them.... hopefully not bad enough to make them move....

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Hmm...I agree with you in the fact that people will switch consoles, because it will happen; especially with gamers that are on low budget and could just buy a 720 (or 360) which will probably be around the same price as the PS4 and would buy games for cheaper. You say console gaming is becoming ridiculous to you, Xbox haven't had any problems as of late, the PS3 is doing well with problems earlier on this year, other consoles seem to be doing fine. You can't say console gaming is ridiculous based on the fact that Sony are going to use this system for PS4 games. It doesn't mean that other consoles will start to do the same thing. I don't think that doing this to games is entirely controlling the consoles; it's just a way to stop people from selling their games, and also for people to have to be paying more for pre-owned games. I don't know how much more it will be, but it won't be higher than the RRP.

In the long run, a lot of people will still be buying pre-owned games for the PS4, even though the price is higher. Eager gamers will still be buying games left, right and center. But Playstation gamers will also go for the 720/PC instead of getting the PS4 knowing about this system. As Fabio mentioned, it is protecting their income. I guess all we can do now is wait and see how everything pans out.

If I'm anyone but a consumer, this would make perfect sense to include on any potential PS4 games. Both Sony and any third-party developers won't be losing out on used games sales (similar to what they're doing for the online passes), but places like Gamestop will still make a profit, too.

What I'm a little concerned about is tying a new game to an account. Personally, I'm not the only one that uses my PS3, so if I were to tie a game to my account, would others using the same console have full access, too? Or will there be some sort of "system account," where anyone can play the game in full on one console, but I can't play it if I use my own PSN account on a friend's PS4?

It be nice if we did know a little bit more of their actual patent, but I guess time will tell if they even decide to implement this technology after all.

Honestly, if you're going to put anti-used games crap on your new games console, just make it a digital download only console. One of the main advantages of discs is being able to resell them, and if they got rid of that there would really be no use for consumers to get the discs other than the price of them.

Really hope there would be some sort of transfer system, because that would SUCK if not. Another thing is that it'd be locked to console because family members use mine personally.

Yeah, I guess they would consider all these problems and take action against them. Obviously with a new system in order, they would go through the problems that it brings and deal with them before release of the console. I don't know how long it will take them to test, it may mean that release of the PS4 will be later than the 720.

Also, Ben, they mentioned that games will be tied to accounts. So unless you're not talking about games being transferred over accounts in a console, I don't think that a transfer will be possible.

I just lost most of my faith in Microsoft, and what little faith I had left in Sony. Seriously.

Digimon Kaiser said:

I just lost most of my faith in Microsoft, and what little faith I had left in Sony. Seriously.

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You had more faith in Sony? PS3 had massive problems throughout the PS3's existence, I remember the online services were down for a while and there was something going on about hacking. If anything, this feature just really makes me not want to get the PS3. Along with all the problems they face, with this added, this really repels me and a lot of others from the PS4.

Pave Low said:

Also, Ben, they mentioned that games will be tied to accounts. So unless you're not talking about games being transferred over accounts in a console, I don't think that a transfer will be possible.

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That's sucks so hard man, if you buy the overpriced game you should be able to do what you wish with it, yet again a great company has seemed to screw us all over once again.

but we'll all come crawling back..