5 systems to 2

I know a lot of people are up in arms about this change on the PSN. I am one of them. We all know that the change is only being made because of gamesharing. Sony and publishers want more money and honestly I see no fault in that but here is the problem. We can physically share a disc based game with our friends. Digital games... not so easy. I don't see anything wrong with "gamesharing" because really... how else will you share a digital game? I have a tight group of gaming friends and we share our disc based games all the time. In fact we have designated shelves for games that belong to our friends. Now when you buy a digital game, you can't physically loan that out to your friends. I find this to be a huge issue but the original PSN policy allowed for limited sharing. I was ok with that. I'm not ok with the further limits of the system now. I like to share my games with my friends and the original policy of 5 systems worked out well for us. Now with only 2 systems active, I can no longer share my digital content with my friends because I actually own 2 PS3s. These would of course be my active systems.

Taking away more features that the PS3 originally used to sell the systems... Bogus. Bait and switch if I've ever seen it.

what do ya'll think?

We talked about this quite a bit on the podcast this week. I’m of the opinion that if developers could find a way to tie games to the system it was first played on then they’d do it. They want to eliminate game sharing at all costs, because it doesn’t make them money. If they could monetize it, they would.

File sharing between a group of friends has always been a bit of a weird topic for me. It’s feels sort of like mini-piracy in a way. Not that it’s wrong, because Sony set up the system to allow you to do that in the hopes that your friends would buy the game as well. When you loan out a physical copy of a game only one other person could have it at a time and that minimized some of the loss that companies felt. With the way that Sony has set it up now up to four of your friends can have it at the same time, and that’s what feels different and a little weird to me.

I’m all for game sharing, because I borrow games and loan games out to people all the time. That’s the way of the world and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

However, with all that being said I don’t like it when anyone takes away a feature of something that was present. You don’t sell something to someone with one thing in mind and one system in place only to take it away from them in the future. It’s a bait and switch and you’re removing part of the value and the reasons that people purchased your product to begin with. It’s just bad business, in my opinion.

The one game on the PSN that utilizes the 5 system limit differently is Warhawk. Now the fully downloaded game allows you to have it active on the 5 different systems but only one system could play it at any time. On top of that, in order for a different system to use the game, it would have to be 24 hrs after it was last played. Something to that extent. I find that to be a legitimate way to combat the "sharing" that Sony dislikes. This would still allow me to share my games yet if we wanted more than one system to play the same game at the same time, we'd have to purchase another copy.

The only reason I think this works for Warhawk is because it's an online only game. Other games can be played offline and so that's where the difficulty lies in the sharing. I don't know if there really is a good solution to this whole thing. For me, I buy disc versions of my games unless there is only the download option. I like my physical copies and I like to do whatever I want with my games without someone else telling me how to use it.

I just don't buy digital games. Problem solved.

Sony has a bad habit of removing features from the PS3. Linux anyone? As much as it drives people mad I am glad Sony isn't afraid to do it. I don't like the change but it at least shows me they are willing to change the PSN as it needs to adapt. For better or worse I suppose. Microsoft is the other side of the spectrum. They act like changing Live is an admittance to fault. Meanwhile, Live is so bloated that I can hardly find anything.

Red Ring of Death pretty much locks me out of even trying to search for anything on Live HA!