One of the biggest talking points of the last month has been how used games will work on next-generation consoles. Even though Microsoft will now support used games and Sony will do the same, whether or not publishers will choose to somehow circumvent that policy remains to be seen.
The day after its E3 conference, Sony said used game restrictions are “up to publishers,” echoing Microsoft’s original policy, which stated that “game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends.” So far, Microsoft hasn't clarified whether or not its new policy allows publishers to dictate used game restrictions, and no publishers have announced specific policies just yet.
While EA has stated that it won’t bring back online passes for Xbox One, we checked in with a few other big third-party publishers at E3 to see if they have used game policies in place yet.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t say much.
Historically Activision is one of the companies that hasn’t charged for used games and hasn’t done things like online passes and whatnot.
“We don’t have any announcements today,” Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg told IGN. “We’re finding out about the first-party policies in real time along with everyone else. Forgive us if we haven’t worked through all the details yet.”
“The only way I can answer your question is by looking at history,” he continued. “Historically Activision is one of the companies that hasn’t charged for used games and hasn’t done things like online passes and whatnot. Our strategy as a company has been to try to make great content that people will want to buy and that they hopefully don’t want to sell. But that’s not an announcement or a future-facing statement. That’s just an articulation of how we’ve approached it in the past.”
We just want to figure out how we all can participate in making that a good thing for everybody.
“We understand that used games provide a value to the person that’s buying this disc,” Ubisoft senior VP of sales and marketing Tony Key told IGN. “For us, we just want to figure out how we all can participate in making that a good thing for everybody. When we have another person with a game from one of our brands, what we have to figure out is, how do we bring them into our family? We have nothing to announce about used games right now. We’re still trying to get our heads around what the first parties are really saying and what they’re going to do.
“There’s a lot of new information out there,” Key continued. “We knew maybe a little bit more than you did [before E3], but we learned a lot of new things as well. We understand that it’s a passionate issue and it’s a big decision. We see both sides of the argument. We’re going to tread carefully before we make a decision that so many people want to know about.”
There’s more to it, and we want to make sure we understand it before we start spouting off.
“It’s one of those things where we just need a minute to figure it out before we dive into what these policies are and how they’ll work and what both of the consoles will do,” Bethesda VP of PR and marketing Pete Hines told IGN. “What I would say is that we’ll absolutely chime in once we’ve had a chance to wrap our heads around it. We need to ask more questions about what they mean by this and how that works and whose relationship is with whom. It’s more just like we want to make sure we know what we’re talking about before we start making statements like, ‘oh, we’re absolutely doing this or that.’ That’s the main thing. Ultimately I think that the answers are probably pretty simple, but it’s a matter of thinking before you speak.”
“You just have to appreciate that, in this climate, we’re reading some of this stuff too and going, ‘what?’ The notion that we know everything way before everybody else is not always true,” Hines added. “There’s plenty of stuff that we know, but there’s some stuff where we’re waiting to hear on this or that and then they say it in public. ‘Oh, so that’s the thing we were waiting to hear. I wonder how that plays out? What’s the fine print on this general statement that they just made? How does that affect us? How does that affect our relationship with these guys and our customers?’ There’s more to it, and we want to make sure we understand it before we start spouting off.”
For more on next-gen used game policies, see our Xbox One wiki and PlayStation 4 wiki. For the other side of the coin, see what Nintendo had to say about used games at E3.
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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