Sony has reacted to recent rumors that claimed that Playstation 3 games would only be playable on the console they were first used on. The Japanese consumer electronics giant claims that this is not the case and that PS3 titles will be playable on any PS3 console.
The stories, which begun surfacing a week ago, suggested that a new technology would be introduced by Sony that would include an authentication code carried by each game. Once that code had been read by one PS3 machine it would be unreadable by others. This technology would mean the end of the second hand games market as well as the end of rentals. It was immediately suggested that the recent rants by Epic's Mark Rein regarding the evils of rentals and second-hand sales was a sign that developers were on-board.
Sony has now gone on record regarding these stories to the Guardian in the U.K. and Jennie Kong, UK PR Manager at SCEE said: I would like to clarify that this is false speculation and that PlayStation 3 software will not be copy protected to a single machine but will be playable on any PlayStation 3 console.
This pretty much puts an end to the rumors, although the detailed accounts of how the authentication system will work suggest that Sony had, at some point, considered such a route. It is still not clear if the authentication technology will be used with Blu-ray at all or if it was simply a research project that will not be utilized in the market place.
