PS4 Share Play was the feature that was going to change the gaming world. Basically, it allows gamers to let their friends play a game they don’t have, by directly streaming it to them. The way it works is one player starts playing and streaming a game while another player watches. The first player can then give up control to the watching player whenever he likes to give them a taste of the action. Not only does this allow gamers to share their favorite games with each other over the internet, it allows for a lot of interesting streamed experiences. For example, a fighting game pro can let YOU choose his character for the next match. Cool right?
Well, there’s a tiny problem. Sony has given developers the ability to censor parts of their game for streaming. This was a capability that was meant to avoid showing spoilers over the internet. The thought was that you could black out important cutscenes in order to force people to experience it themselves. This way you wouldn’t necessarily be unable to play a game, rather, you would simply play a game without the important story bits.
On paper, this is a great way to get people to shell out the bucks for their own copy of a game that they played while sharing. In practice, there are a couple problems with this functionality.
First of all, you can censor more than just cutscenes. You can censor gameplay portions as well. This effectively allows developers to prevent people from even watching certain gameplay portions, let alone play them via Share Play. There is also no limit on how much you can censor a game, meaning that you can simply censor the entire game and completely block it off from both streaming and Share Play.
Not to mention, all of these censorship abilities can be circumvented. Don’t believe me? Go to YouTube on day 1 of the release of any game and search for the ending. You are almost guaranteed to find it, if not on day 1 then definitely on day 2. There are legions of fans out there seeking to beat games as quickly as possible, record them, and put those recordings on the internet. Heck, it’s basically a competition, as the earliest recordings get the most views. So if the point of the censorship functionality is to prevent spoilers form being shared it doesn’t do a very good job. Not to mention, people have been streaming games well before the PS4 had built in streaming functionality. So there is still a legion of gamers out there with capture cards that can get around the censorship functionality anyway.
So, in short, this censorship function isn’t doing its job, which is a good argument for removing it entirely. But outside of the pragmatic world, let’s ask an interesting question. Should Sony have included this functionality in the first place? Or perhaps that question is better worded as “Do companies have a right to censor a game after it has been released to the public?”
Prior to a game’s release, this makes perfect sense. The game is the sole property of the developer and publisher and they can hold whatever images and info back that they want.
But once someone purchases a game, isn’t it their game? Don’t they have ownership of it? If they want to record themselves playing the game and show it to the internet, isn’t that within their rights? If they want to let their friends play the game, isn’t that their right as well? Isn’t this censorship functionality just trying to shackle people who paid for the right to do what they like with their copy of a game? One of the PS4’s big selling points was that if you wanted to share a game with a friend, all you had to do was give them the disk. However, with this censorship functionality built into Share Play, it feels as if Sony is trying to prevent you from giving your friend the controller, or perhaps letting you tackle them and cover their eyes whenever a big story sequence goes down.
But we never did that whenever we invited our friends over to sit on our couch and play our games. We always let them decide whether or not they wanted to be spoiled. Back before the PS4 had streaming capability, gamers could choose themselves whether or not they wanted to join streams or watch videos that had spoilers in them. I don’t particularly see why that can’t be the case with PS4 Share Play today. Gamers are pretty good at taking that responsibility into their own hands.
What do you think? Should Sony, game publishers, or game developers, have the right to control what you spoil and what you let your friends play? Let us know in the comments.