I read this like a Week ago.

My general thought was...

"They'll do this only if they want to completely destroy their buisness."

CD Keys.

If they even keep sny shelf space.

PS3 would probably end up like PC games at Gamestop.

Order only.

Considering the importance of Gamestop, and the importance of the used market in Japan...  that'd be career suicide.

It might actually make the 360 viable in japan.

See... this is why in marketing everyone wants to be a "Lifestyle" brand.

Videogame companies are very much "lifestyle" brands.  It started out when kids were either labeled "Nintendo kids" "Sega Kids" or "Weird/poor kids."

It's like all those people who identify with Nascar and buy Nascar beef jerky and the like.

When you identify with a Lifestyle brand you basically give it a part of your life and personality... which gives you as a company HUGE leeway.

No way will Sony implement a system where a disk can only be played in a maximum of 5 machines ever for the "lifetime" of the disk.

That would mean video game rental for PS3 games would die. Whereas it would keep on trucking along for 360 and Wii. That would be a HUGE mistake in terms of longer term console sales, especially if carried forward to the next gen of console. Like it or not game rental is a fixture of the console gaming industry, and unless all console makers kill off game rental at the same time then one console maker isn't going to go down that route by themselves.

Do it. And I'll voluntarly avoid any Sony product from now on.

Meh, I purchase all my games new anyways, unless it's a title that is years old and i'm looking for something else to play - or if I decide to re-buy a game I've previously owned but sold.

They could always just offer seperate "Rental" discs.  Rental companies already pay more for a rental copy anyawy.

Though... I suppose then those would just get pirated eh?

The problem with that is that it defies all credible economic studies done on the matter.

In general studies show that piracy almost always happens when consumers think a price is unreasobnable because people WANT to consume and don't want to pirate.

in third world countries there is increase piracy because the prices are seen as too high and in 1st world countries, those who pirate actually on average buy more games those who don't pirate.

The effects of piracy that are less clear that are actually worth argueing about rather then the largely disproven and discredit  arguement most people try to push are...

.1)  Piracy hurts used games sales... since it doesn't allow for prices to go down organically since it's either "$60 or $55 bucks of free."  This is the real and only area piracy seriously hurts.  You don't hear this though because Nobody cares about gamestop since a lot of people hate used game sales, and Gamestop realizes that the actions to combat piracy are in reality actions done to try and curb the used game sales. 

Heck, note until Funcoland and Gamestop showed up on the scene nobody gave a shit about piracy.   Dreamcast had zero copy protection... most people didn't even know until the NES came out that piracy was wrong!  Even then Nintendo didn't really do anything to stop them, they were just mad they weren't getting money from cartridges/liscensing for "homebrew" and "unliscnesed" games.   Even then it wasn't really about piracy.

2) Does Piracy existing on a market inherently degrade the value of games in the eyes of average the consumer?  Thereby artificially lowering the market and in a way creating it's own piracy sales.

Which is an interesting arguement... but an extremely hard variably to extract.

Well, perhaps indeed, I couldn't publicly rent it.