There have been rumors that the next generation of consoles will have features that will attack the sale of pre-owned sales. This has caused some developers and gamers anxiety, but Crytek director of creative development Rasmus Hoejengaard says it would be "awesome."
"From a business perspective that would be absolutely awesome," Hoejengaard told Gamespot. "It's weird that [second-hand] is still allowed because it doesn't work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well."
Both Sony and Microsoft's next consoles will supposedly restrict used games. For example, PlayStation 4 (possibly called "Orbis") is said to require players to tie their games to their PSN account. If played by another PSN user, certain features of the game would be locked.
Developers and publishers typically don't get any money from the resale of pre-owned games. It's easy to see why they would be happy about a console that could block these used games from being played. However, some companies, like Witcher 2 dev CD Projekt, aren't convinced that forcing players to buy new games is the best solution.
"We want to do as much as possible for our players, our gamers. We don't want to force anyone. It's like we did with DRM-free: we give them freedom and we believe they will stay with us," CD Projekt's Adam Badowski said in February.
Sony and Microsoft haven't released any details about their next consoles. They're expected to announce them next year. I hope it's sooner than that, because it feels a bit odd to be debating a feature that may or may not actually be implemented in these consoles.
