A diagram of Sony's new DRM technology

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PlayStation 3: Only New Will Do?

An interesting rumor has been floating around the Internet this week. Apparently, Sony holds the patent for a piece of technology that could make it so that the PlayStation 3 won’t play used games or rentals, and while you’re at it you can forget about taking a game to a buddy’s place and playing it there…of course this is only if the rumor turns out to be true.

According to the patent filing this is largely what this new DRM technology is meant to do, with the addition of being able to detect and block pirated software. The filing describes the technology as “A device and method for protection of legitimate software against used software and counterfeit software in recording media.”

How this will be performed is through a piece of magnetic or optical data stored on the game disc. This data gives off a pulse when running in the console, which the system picks up. It is this pulse that identifies the software as new, and legitimately purchased. Once the system detects this pulse it registers the software on the particular disc to that one unit, and deletes the data that was meant to identify the

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software as new. Since this data is no longer present on the game disc, the software can no longer tell other PlayStation 3’s that it is new, and as such it won’t run in someone else’s system.

This isn’t merely a coincidental side effect of this new DRM technology for Sony either. The company appears to be going out of their way to ensure that used games cannot be played on the

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PS3. This can be seen later in the patent filing, “It is an object of the present invention to provide a disk recording medium for the protection of legitimate recorded media in which security is maintained so that the sale of used software and counterfeit software can be prevented.”

Recently a couple of high-profile industry figures have stepped forward to criticize the used game market: David Jaffe (creator of God of War), and Mark Rein (President of Epic Games). On top of this, a few years ago a number of Japanese game publishers were embroiled in a lawsuit to prevent the sale of used games by retailers in Japan. Although the lawsuit failed, in time Japanese publishers did managed to prevent the rental of videogames in their home market. With these facts in mind, it does suggest that there is a strong anti-used games sentiment in the development community.

But will Sony go through with it? That’s a tough call. One beneficial aspect of this technology would be that there’s a chance that publishers could earn more money since gamers could only buy new PS3 software, and not used (which publishers earn no money from). However, this doesn’t take into account that many trade-in their old games in order to help pay for new games. If people can’t sell off their old PS3 games since they won’t work on another system, this runs the risk of people buying fewer games because they now have less means by which to round up the cash to do so. On top of this, implementing such technology will essentially forfeit the Try Before You Buy rental market.

A lot of people in the development end of the game industry are passionate about doing away with the used games market, but to do so at this point could be potentially dangerous for Sony. There are a number of reasons people rent, borrow, or buy their games used, not the least of which being that for many games are still too expensive at a $50 price point. This DRM technology would force consumers to get PS3 games at such a prohibitive price, and potentially send them either to one of the company's competitors or to another completely different hobby all together. At this point Sony won’t confirm anything regarding whether this DRM technology will actually be implemented into the PlayStation 3, leaving gamers to wait and hope for the best.

Mr. Nash

November 11, 2005

What do you think of all this if it turns out that the PlayStation 3 indeed can't play used games or rentals? Discuss it in the forums!


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