Can it be that another crop of new consoles is just beyond the horizon? It seems like just yesterday we were talking about the Nintendo Revolution or the Xbox 2 or the PlayStation… 3. And yet, here we are, once again, letting our imaginations run wild about what the future holds. Details are sparse at best about the next Xbox and the next PlayStation, but there is one rumor that has gotten a fair amount of attention. That rumor is that neither system will play used games. I’m here to tell you why that won’t be happening. Not this generation at least.
Firstly, it will be a technological kludge. Let’s look at DRM as an example of companies using technology to achieve a goal. How long does it normally take some resourceful hacker to break an otherwise “unbreakable” DRM scheme? A few months? For every man-hour a company expends trying to write a piece of code, there are literally hundreds of hacker-hours spent cracking it. It’s just a numbers game. If Microsoft and Sony implement a system that prevents their consoles from playing used games, it will be the mission of studious hackers to crack that system. Remember what happened to Sony when they got rid of the Other OS option on the PS3? The hacker community was furious and it ended up costing Sony quite a lot of time and money. Now, I don’t advocate this sort of thing, threatening financial harm through hacking, but I am at least acknowledging that it’s a real scenario that will play out. The simple fact is that setting up a system to prevent the systems from playing used games will be futile. Someone will figure out a way around it.
