During its Nintendo Direct event Thursday, the company revealed “Virtual Game Cards,” which will allow players to share games or play across multiple systems. It also teased “Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.”
On the previous generation (which seems to be a lifetime ago now) Microsoft got badly burned on trying something like this, because they did it (and announced it) spectacularly wrong.
They wanted to allow game sharing by tying it to a system where you wouldn’t be able to play your own games if your console wasn’t online, so it could always track who’s supposed to play every game. Lots of people shat on their announcement, because, understandably, fuck needing an internet connection to play offline games.
Sony exploited that saying their console would not need to stay always online and mostly “won” that generation’s console announcement, while Microsoft hastily backpedaled to the usual too, probably costing them quite a bit since release was so close.
So in the end I think both were very reluctant to try the kind of DRM that would allow sharing again.
On the previous generation (which seems to be a lifetime ago now) Microsoft got badly burned on trying something like this, because they did it (and announced it) spectacularly wrong.
They wanted to allow game sharing by tying it to a system where you wouldn’t be able to play your own games if your console wasn’t online, so it could always track who’s supposed to play every game. Lots of people shat on their announcement, because, understandably, fuck needing an internet connection to play offline games.
Sony exploited that saying their console would not need to stay always online and mostly “won” that generation’s console announcement, while Microsoft hastily backpedaled to the usual too, probably costing them quite a bit since release was so close.
So in the end I think both were very reluctant to try the kind of DRM that would allow sharing again.