EA stands at the crossroads of DRM

Microsoft’s Xbox One has a built-in DRM feature that makes freely lending or reselling games impossible at this point. You need to go through some kind of verification system and you can only resell your used disc-based games through participating retailers. Sony’s PS4 maintains the status quo of this generation’s rules. As illustrated in a tongue-in-cheek instructional video, you own the game so do what you want with it. Sony representatives did clarify that third-party publishers will be able to set up whatever rules they want – just like they can currently.

Electronic Arts is one of the publishers faced with these different rules and according to chief operating officer Peter Moore, they don’t yet know what they will do. Moore spoke to Polygon about the internal debates they are having.

“We’re focused at this point in time in new games and our official position is, ‘I’ll get back to you’. Sony have announced what they are going to do which is, y’know, business as usual, and then Microsoft are looking at allowing a publisher to opt-in, should they choose to do so. But if we opt in, do [Microsoft] charge a fee, and if so, how much? We have not internally even begun to sit down and answer those questions.

We will figure out what we need to do. I’m not trying to back-pedal but this thing just happened and we need to reconvene and hear what people think and talk to our retail partners and our first party partners. We had no idea what Sony was going to announce. We’ll reconvene next week and figure it all out.”

On the subject of whether or not EA had pressured Sony or Microsoft to build DRM features into their next-gen consoles, Moore denied the rumor. He also reiterated that the Online Pass program was cancelled because consumers made it clear they didn’t like it.