The PlayStation 4 is doing many things right. It’s ticking the boxes the developers want to see – it’s certainly powerful enough and that RAM is well received; it’s making gamers happy with great first party titles and solid third party support; and it’s making publishers happy – it’ll even offer publishers the ability to block which sections of the game players can share.
Yep, that Share button will come with restrictions, at the publisher’s will.
“There will be parts of a game that the maker does not want people to be able to see,” said Sony boss Shuhei Yoshida, speaking to 4Gamer (and translated here). “The creator may not want to make video of the final boss sharable, for instance,” he adds by way of an example.
[drop2]So, a tool that can upload (at least) seven minutes or so of a live Killzone Shadow Fall demo for instant download anywhere by anyone, can be crippled by publishers so that so-called key parts of game can’t be shared.Gamers can talk about how to beat the boss, video it themselves and push to YouTube, but they won’t be able to use that Share button.
This is a button that – you’ll note – takes pride of place on the DualShock 4. It’s directly next to the d-pad and it’s on the way to the touch screen. For a reason: Sony want you to use it – the PS4’s built around the button and it’s core, central to the way it works.
Yoshida makes the point that the Vita does the same thing, in a sense. “For example,” he says, “on Vita, developers can in certain scenes disable the feature that lets users take a screenshot, and (the Share function) will have a similar mechanism.” It’s not really similar, though – the Vita’s screenshot function (hidden away unless you know the button combination) can’t really compare with the dedicated PS4 tool.
“We were trying to think of a way to make it easier for users to upload video, and one day a member of our in-house production team just said, ‘How about a Share button?’ We called out in unison, ‘That’s it!’” says Yoshida, talking about the birth of the idea.
The desire to share videos comes from Yoshida’s recent Dark Souls run-through. Yoshida couldn’t play the game all day long, so he’d look on Japanese video site Niconico to see others playing it. “By doing that, you can find other ways to play the game and read comments by other users,” he says. “I felt that sharing videos is a really important part of enjoying games.”
Which, to me, goes against the restrictions.
For starters, how will this even work? If the PS4’s recording constantly, does it just throw up white noise when I’m running around with Nathan Drake taking down whoever’s this game’s bad guy? Does it turn voices into chipmunks when the final cut-scene plays? An ugly message that just says “You Cannot Share This Section Of The Game?”.
If you can’t share the last bits – and I appreciate this is publisher dependent – then what’s the point? Hey, look, I just started the game, watch me play the same bits you’ve all played? No.
All it needs is the ability to label uploaded video with some kind of spoiler flag – although I’d argue that every minute of a game is a potential spoiler, highlighting which bits are truly crucial would prevent those not yet at that point from being spoiled.
It’s not like there’s going to be a constant stream of videos pushed to you, surely the PS4’s UI will be a carefully managed collection of videos from your friends, and if you follow folk that repeatedly post videos of a game’s ending, well, that’s obviously what you’d rather do. So who’s to stop you?
Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe Yoshida’s words are mis-translated, but to me it shouldn’t be down to a publisher which parts of a game can be shared. Give them an inch, and all that.
Thoughts?
TSBonyman
I’ll probably never use the Share button for anything other than to record something for my own amusement.
Everybody will be recording/sharing everything at the beginning and if my inbox is being spammed with “hey watch my latest cod/killzone mp episode”, along with fifty other people who’ve taken it upon themselves to do a weekly cod/kz episode of their ‘awesome exploits’ – which it probably will as i’m certain there will be trophies attached to sharing – i’ll be removing and blocking ‘friends’ wholesale… ;)
Just blocking the bits that the developers requested won’t prevent what many gamers might still consider spoilers so it will be down to the individual to take that risk if they are are worried about spoilers.
If there is potential for spoilers in sharing then surely there is going to be even greater potential with the proposed streaming service which allows you to watch your friends play games you don’t own.
DuffyBox
Agreed about the blocking.
Regarding the spoiler tag, perhaps there should be an intensity level to go along with it? Spoilers could be denoted by a little red triangle and a number from 1-5 inside it could describe how intense the spoiler is, with 1 being for anything after the tutorial and 5 being the game’s ending. Just a thought.
Root Ginger
Could this also be to do with processing? Having the PS4 constantly recording will be using some CPU cycles. Having the ability to switch it off to maximise some effects in certain parts of a game will be benefitial to developers.
riceahomie
One big problem for game publishers with the “Share” function, at least initially, is going to be handling licenses with third parties. For example, publishers of games that contain music licensed from major labels and music publishers are going to have to convince the licensors to get on board, because it is basically a quick means for users to violate copyright laws left and right. Hopefully rights owners will recognize that much of the user-generated content can be monetized (such as by putting ads into sites that display user-generated content containing their material) and will see a benefit to the exploitation. Otherwise, game publishers will have to disable Share-ability for vast portions of games (like Saint’s Row) or mute music tracks filtered through the Share function (if that’s possible). We shall see!