“You’re all being played” Bleszinski slams Sony’s lack of used game blockers as a PR tactic

[binary solo]

A203D said:
I actually agree with Cliff and what Microsoft are doing with DRM.

I won't buy the console, but I agree with their stance, I just think that there could be a middle ground rather than taking such a strict stance.

DRM already exists anyway for games you buy from Xbox Live or PSN. These companies need to find a way to make purchasing these games more attractive.

For example, lets say a game at launch retails at $45 instead of $60. That to me would be an acceptable environment to implement DRM.

No it doesn't, not for PSN at least. If I sell my PS3 and don't mind losing my PSN account then the person buying my PS3 also buys all my PSN games off me. In fact I could list my PSN account on e-bay and list all the games purchased on that account and sell to the highest bidder. I deactivate my PSN account from my PS3, give them the password and bam, instant game collection for them. I used a fake name and address for my PSN account, and used a "disposable" gmail account and made all purchases using the pre-paid PSN cards. There's none of my personal identity associated with my PSN account...actually none of that's true because I wasn't smart enough to do that when I fisrt signed up for PSN, but it's all doable.

Digital distribution does not provide you with a physical commodity uniquely associated with a single game (i.e. a disc), so you can't trade used games in the same way as you trade discs. But they are still tradeable. Everyone chooses not to sell their PSN accounts when they sell their old PS3's, and trophies have incentivised people to retain their accounts.

There is no natural way for digitally distributed games to be traded singly without breeching copyright laws (i.e. creating another copy of the game). I can't send you a game as an attachment to an e-mail and have it disappear from my PCs HDD the instant I create the e-mail attachment. Thus I would be in breech of copyright.  Therefore in the digital environment for trading individual games publishers would have to make a deliberate decision to provide consumers with a means by which trading can happen without games being copied. No business is under any moral, ethical or legal obligation to create a digital trading mechanism. But with discs the means of trade already exists and publishers choose to distribute games via a tradeable object.

See the difference?