Sony Confirms Its Used Game Policies Will Not Change

Sony’s head of  its Computer Entertainment Europe division Jim Ryan has been talking with the UK’s Metro newspaper and has reiterated Sony’s commitment to its used game policies. He addressed some rising concerns which stem from the fact that game publishers might be unhappy with Sony’s decision about used games relative to Microsoft’s decision which will allow game publishers to profit from used games (which Microsoft recently made a U-turn on).

Sony stated while it is true game publishers and developers won’t be able to make as much per game sold (because their is no used game cut on top of the first sale), they will sell more games in total because this policy has made Sony’s PS4 a more popular console. In essence Sony is still meeting the needs of its business partners because they will sell more than on the Xbox One, or at least they predict that they will.

“Publishers are our major partners, we talk to them on a very regular basis – we listen to what they say. At the end of the day they have to provide an account to their shareholders and the single biggest factor that influences whether they make money, on either individual titles or a portfolio, is the size of the installed base that they’re publishing on. And that dwarfs everything else.”

In Sony’s view the business model is simple – there is more money to be had in selling lots of new games than there is to be had in trying to take a cut of the used game market.

“Yes there is a certain common knowledge that there is unhappiness within the publishing community over the fact that they do not participate in the second-hand business. However, if you offer any publisher a choice between an installed base of X – where X is a very large number – with the status quo on the second-hand disc-based model or 50 per cent of X and some sort of putative cut of the second-hand business I can predict with 100 per cent certainty what they would take.”

What are your thoughts on this?

Image courtesy of the Metro