The rumours that the PS4 would
permanently require an internet connection and
block used games have officially been confirmed to be untrue by Sony.
If Diablo 3 taught us anything, it's that not everyone loves the idea of games that demand an internet connection.
In fact, it was hard to find anyone who loved games that demand an internet connection, which was sort of the problem: if you can't outweigh the pain of potential inconvenience to whatever proportion of your audience, then you simply aren't going to win that battle. Click click click loot loot loot.
Good news, then, because Sony Computer Entertainment seems to have reached the same conclusion at a system level for PlayStation 4, and as the result the new console will do pretty much whatever you customise it to do when it comes to the internet.
Sony's super-slick PS4 conference talked about a lot of functionality that will clearly benefit from an internet connection more than ever before - a processing module that handles downloads in the console's suspend state, for one thing - but when I talked to Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida after the PS4 conference he was adamant it was all customisable.
Does the PlayStation 4 always need to be connected to the internet, I asked?
"You can play offline, but you may want to keep it connected," he suggested. "The system has the low-power mode - I don't know the official term - that the main system is shut down but the subsystem is awake. Downloading or updating or you can wake it up using either the tablet, smartphone or PS Vita."
Are all of those things optional, though? For people who have broadband data limits, for example? They can customise everything?
"Oh yes, yes, you can go offline totally. Social is big for us, but we understand there are some people who are anti-social! So if you don't want to connect to anyone else, you can do that."
Sony clearly isn't afraid of technical nuance. This is a company that announced its next-generation console by declaring it has an x86 architecture, advanced PC GPU, 8GB of GDDR5 memory and a massive hard disk. You may like some of its networking ideas. You may not like some of them. I got the impression speaking to Yoshida that Sony has other priorities.
Speaking from experience, it's always been good at allowing people to change what they want up to a logical point - far beyond any of its competitors - and I see no reason to suspect any change this generation.
Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has told Eurogamer that PlayStation 4 will not block the use of second-hand games, contrary to various reports, speculation and even a Sony patent unearthed last month.
I sat down with Yoshida a few hours after the PS4 reveal tonight and one of the first things I asked was whether used games would be blocked.
"Do you want us to do that?" he asked.
No, I said. I think, if you buy something on a disc, that you have a kind of moral contract with the person you've bought it from that you retain some of that value and you can pass it on.
Do you agree, I asked?
"Yes. That's the general expectation by consumers," said Yoshida. "They purchase physical form, they want to use it everywhere, right? So that's my expectation."
So if someone buys a PlayStation 4 game, I asked, you're not going to stop them reselling it?
"Aaaah," was Yoshida's initial answer, but seemingly only because he'd forgotten his line. "So what was our official answer to our internal question?" he asked his Japanese PR advisor. The advisor stepped in but didn't seem to answer clearly, at least to my ears. Yoshida then took control again firmly:
"So, used games can play on PS4. How is that?"
I said I thought that was fine.
Interestingly, I also spoke to a Sony source elsewhere at the event this evening who told me that the anti used-game patent discovered last month was actually nothing to do with PlayStation 4 at all.
The patent suggested that discs would come branded with a contactless tag that could be recognised and read by your console, which would then bind it to you and prevent you from selling it on.
But whatever reason Sony did have for patenting it, it sounds like it wasn't for its next-generation console. Hopefully Microsoft will also avoid this ludicrous technology with its next-generation Xbox as well.
