One of the more memorable moments of the PlayStation E3 2013 Press Conference was when ex-SCEA President Jack Tretton confirmed that the PlayStation 4 wouldn’t enforce DRM and would support used games – a clear response to Microsoft’s Xbox One policies at the time.
At the Develop conference today in Brighton, Sony Computer Entertainment President Andrew House talked about their E3 2013 showing, revealing how he re-wrote some of the script to make sure no one thought they would follow Microsoft’s lead on DRM and used game restrictions:
It made us feel a little bit clearer about our message, when a lot of the negativity was emerging around DRM issues and used games. I remember reading an article literally the weekend before E3 that was basically saying that this is the direction Microsoft was taking and that it was only a matter of time before Sony adopts the same approach.
That sort of put me on the back foot and I went and re-wrote portions of my E3 presentation script that weekend and we re-crafted the presentation because there was now an onus on us not to be seen to be going down the same path.
Although they never planned to do those things anyways, House added, “All it did was make us come out and state very clearly ‘the status quo has been good to us, consumers like the choice and the balance that achieves’. It wasn’t a shift in strategy, it was just a feeling of a necessity to go out and communicate something that we just took advantage of.”
[Source: Eurogamer]
