Sony announced during their conference on Tuesday morning that there would be no trade-in restrictions on Playstation 4, but following an elaboration on the subject by Sony's Jack Tretton, it seems that the situation isn't as clear cut as it was made to sound during the E3 media briefing:
"We create the platform. We've certainly stated with our first party games, we're not going to be doing that. But we welcome publishers and their business models to our platforms. There's going to be free-to-play, there's going to be every potential business model on there and again that's up to their relationship with the consumer and what they think is going to put them in the best stead. So we're not going to dictate that. We're going to give them a platform to publish on.
The DRM decision is going to have to be in the hands of the third parties. That's not something that we're going to dictate or control or mandate or implement."
The comments came during an interview with Tretton on GameTrailers (about 1h09m in).
Microsoft came under a lot of flack after they revealed they were going to implement a new system for trade-in games, restricting consumers in areas such as lending games, and picking up used copies at retail. They clarified their position last week:
We designed Xbox One so game publishers can enable you to trade in your games at participating retailers. Microsoft does not charge a platform fee to retailers, publishers, or consumers for enabling transfer of these games.
Third party publishers may opt in or out of supporting game resale and may set up business terms or transfer fees with retailers. Microsoft does not receive any compensation as part of this. In addition, third party publishers can enable you to give games to friends. Loaning or renting games won't be available at launch, but we are exploring the possibilities with our partners.
There's still a lot of questions that need answering. Sony's promise of allowing us to be able to trade in games at retail, sell them to other people, lend them to friends, or keep them forever, only applies to first party titles, and there may be restrictions on third-party titles which we're not aware of yet. While there may not be a gating system in place on PS4, as there is to be with Xbox One, this still puts the publishers in control of their own releases. As it stands they're not saying anything, and it may be a while before we have further clarification on this controversial issue.
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