Just as the PS4 won’t restrict you from buying used games, it also won’t restrict you from buying games from other countries, Sony announced last night. When asked about his company’s new consumer friendly policy, a Sony exec insisted that this is what they’ve been planning all along, and their decision to keep the PS4 DRM free wasn’t made in response to the growing controversy over the Xbox One’s unpopular restrictions on used games.
“It’s something that we believe in. We know gamers come first; we know what they want. I was personally overwhelmed with the massive explosion on Twitter, with everyone essentially begging, ‘Please don’t do this Sony, please don’t do this PlayStation!’ It was so hard not to say, right away, ‘Well, we never were going to do that,” said Sony VP of Worldwide Studios Scott Rohde in an interview with Polygon last night.
Despite Sony’s insistence that Microsoft’s decisions didn’t influence their own policies, Sony hasn’t been shy about gloating over their obvious advantage and rubbing some salt in Microsoft’s self-inflicted wound: Sony posted a parody video online detailing the process of getting used games to work on the PS4 (above), and in his Polygon interview, Rohde talked about how confident Sony is after yesterday’s press conferences. “We kind of had a feeling; we kind of knew we were gonna land a little bit cheaper than those green guys. When it was verified this morning, we’ve just been walking around with smiles all day.”
I attended some of the E3 press conferences yesterday, and let me tell you, there weren’t a lot of people in the crowd who were excited when Microsoft announced a $500 price tag for the Xbox One. Sony has spent most of the 360/PS3 generation playing catch-up with Microsoft, but with the PS4’s lower price and lack of DRM, it suddenly seems like Sony has all of the momentum in the next gen console war. Check back later today for some hands-on impressions with the PS4 controller, its first games, and more news from Sony, straight fro the E3 showfloor.
