One of the best features of the PS3, in my opinion, is the ability to share games bought via the PSN Store with 4 of your friends. Thanks to the generosity of Sony and a few of my friends were kind enough to put their PSN accounts on my system, I’ve amassed a pretty sizable collection of quality, downloadable games that I probably would have never purchased on my own. Sadly, the good times are coming to an end, as Sony announced today that effective November 18th, they will impose further limits on game sharing.
Starting Nov. 18, games will only be able to be activated twice: once on your system, and once on another, a reduction from the current 5 activations permitted previously. All previous activated content will still fall under the 5 activation limit, but anything purchased after November 18th will be subject to the newer, more stringent rules.
Obviously, game sharing was a point of contention between Sony and developers; users being able to share their games with 4 friends meant that game companies potentially lost 4 other people to sell games to, but I felt that the ability to share games actually helped developers. Thanks to friends sharing games like PixelJunk Monsters or Flower with me, I was able to give games that I otherwise wouldn’t have purchased on my own a try, and because of it, I became a fan of the developers of those games and later purchased more games by them. The ability to share my downloadable games also made me chose to purchase games over PSN rather than XBLA when possible, and now that that choice is gone, I’ll probably have to decide whether I’ll want the 360 or the PS3 versions of downloadable games on a case-by-case basis from now on instead of defaulting to PSN.
Rian Quenlin
Well I can see where they’re coming from, but it’s still BS to have a generous policy and change your mind on it.
Calling it, PSN sales skyrocketing tomorrow.
Chris Hernandez
I think their idea of game sharing, was really a way of bringing the experience of taking a game disc over to a buddies house to play to the digital realm. But then people abused to basically give friends and possibly strangers a bunch of free games.
It was a great idea in concept and as usual it took a couple of idiots to ruin it for everyone. But even then the two activation is still more than sufficient.
Though the xbox still gets this right in the sense that I can copy any XBLA game and my gamertag over to a flash drive and take it to my friends to play without any hassle or need to activate anything.
I do agree that people will be buying more games now than ever so as to share with their friends, which I would hope they all pitch in for of course.
Rian Quenlin
It’s not like it even costs anything to have digital sales. The way digital sales are going, publishers are probably sweating bullets thinking that they developers are going to just give them the finger and leave them in the dust.