The advent of cloud-based gaming brings with it many disadvantages. We don’t truly own the titles we download, which can disappear into the ether at any moment, and a first-party monopoly means we can wave goodbye to shopping around for better prices.
But the worst part? We won’t be able to flog old discs to CEX to fund our debilitating shacket addiction. Completed games are doomed to clog up our console memory before we reluctantly delete them forever.
It might not be all bad, though. A new Sony PS5 patent reveals that the Japanese tech giants are floating the idea of a game trade-in model over the PlayStation Store. That’s particularly good news if the PS5 turns out to be entirely cloud-based, as many rumours suggest.
The patent poses more questions than answers, though. In theory, players will be able to sell their games back to Sony once they’re done with them, but it’s not known how the price will be set. Considering most gamers will take advantage of the feature (downloads from the PlayStation Store often come at a hefty cost), you would assume that PlayStation will keep the sell-back price low.
It should all be taken with a pinch of salt, of course. Developers often use patents to call dibs on an idea, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that Sony is deadset on rolling the idea out with the PlayStation 5, or at all.
One of the more convincing rumours surrounding the next console is the possibility of backwards compatibility. Patents suggest that Sony will allow you to play games from any PlayStation generation, which would also point to the forthcoming console including a disc-tray. Don’t wave goodbye to those shackets just yet.
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