Sony pains pre-owned game punters with PSN Pass
Net profits
Sony has officially announced the PSN Pass, a network tollbooth for "premium" online services.
The belt will tighten in September with the launch of exclusive PS3 title Resistance 3. The game will come with a code that will allow the purchaser to play online through PSN.
Anyone purchasing secondhand copies of the game from someone who has used the code will have to buy a fresh access chit to play Resistance 3 online. Sony hasn't said how much the pass code will cost.
Whatever the price, the PSN Pass is essentially a tax on folk who buy pre-owned games.
Resistance 3 is out 9 September
A Sony spokesperson said: "We are always evaluating new programmes for our online offering, and starting with Resistance 3 this September, we will be instituting a network pass programme for PS3 games with online capabilities.
"This programme will be game-specific. Games that are a part of this programme will include a single-use registration code that grants the account holder redeeming the code full online access for that title.
"This is an important initiative as it allows us to accelerate our commitment to enhancing premium online services across our first party game portfolio."
Sony has been pondering the imposition of online fees for some time. Plus, EA, THQ, Codemasters and Warner have all used an Online Pass tool in their games. ®
COMMENTS
In other news...
...Sony are currently developing a new 1st person shooter entitled "Corporate Strategy." The objective of which is too shoot yourself in the foot as much as possible in order to wipe out all traces of market share.
solution
SImple, consumers vote with their pockets and just dont bother buying this game in the first place.
I'm surprised Sony would announce this so soon after their recent embarrassment
fixed
"We are always evaluating new programmes for our online offering,"
"We are always looking for new ways to charge customers"
Stealing?
"The developers and producers make these games, and once a company like Game steps in, buys your old game off you for a few quid and then sells it for 10, the developers and producers make nothing for their hard work and Game effectively pirates it."
That's nonsense. The devs got rewarded through the original sale, and then the good (a DVD with the game on it) belongs to me, period. And I can do with my property whatever I want.
But I guess if you sell your car then you give a share of the money you got to the car manufacturer, right? And if you sell your house, I guess you give a part of the money to the builder who built the house at some point in the past, or to his descendants. No? Why not? Following your crude logic, if you don't give them a share, you're effectively stealing from them.
Of course game publishers want to drain some of the money that goes in 2nd hand games. However, they are only able to get through with it if their customers actually are that stupid to believe they are stealing from the devs when selling or buying used games.
"Once enough people can't buy the game and sales fall off then the prices have to come down, and arsehole companies like EA make less billions and start treating their paying customers better - like perhaps stopping putting bullshit DRM into their products."
Yeah, in your dreams maybe. Here on Planet Earth they more likely will claim the low sales on piracy and then come up with even stronger measures, as they did in the past.
By now it should be very obvious that the aim of the gaming industry is to get their customers away from the 'pay one play forever' model where games come on physical media to a 'pay-per-use' model where they can charge gamers for the time they are playing. They have made this more than clear on various occasions, and you have to be very thick to miss that. The beginning was made by Valve with STEAM games like HL2 where only a part of the game is on the physical media, and the game is locked to a certain user account.Later supplemented by online activation (with a limited amount of activations of course), digital distribution, DLC (charging for content which should have come with the game), requiring an online connection when playing single player games, and now it's activation codes for multiplayer. Of course all these charged-for options are not transferrable. If you really believe that they will ever go back to DRM-free distribution you're delusional.
Game publishers found that a big part of their customer base is retarded enough to swallow the constant blame on piracy (games are never low because a title is crap, sure) and happily pay for slices of a game which used to come in one piece. Look at when EA introduced their permanent online requirement. Everyone cried but in the end there were enough idiots who actually purchased this crap.
or maybe
Or maybe they could make games that weren't mindless churned out crap that can be completed in 6 hours so that their gamers actually hold onto them for more than a week?
