What's clear to me is that Sony has basically called the big publishers' bluff. They are daring EA, Ubisoft and the rest to incite the anger of the whole internet by continuing down this DRM path. They are saying, "we won't stop you, but I can't imagine you can sell all your third person shooters or car games on a subscription model."
And the funny thing is it seems to be working. EA and Activision are already trying to distance themselves from the issue, and MS is sitting there holding the bag with this entire draconian infrastructure that compromises their platform even if no one ends up using it.
A little bit of background information here. One of the first places information came to SCE regarding the plan of DRM of MS was from someone at one of the major publishers. This was a long time back now, and SCE wasn't intending on implementing any DRM so they essentially gave feelers back along those lines too to everyone. The top execs at major publishers have known for months SCE would not be joining MS in their plans with such a DRM system. They probably just didn't expect SCE to do what they did at E3.
Regardless of this whole talk about Sony changing their mind on DRM and having huge internal discussions about it in the past couple of months (they didn't as the major policies were nailed down prior to the official unveiling of the PS4), they did indeed take advantage of the mess Microsoft created. They knew as early as January that MS was going to do something quite crazy so they wanted to wait. It's also why they were being cautious with making some official announcement on it, even though some people actually spoke up and gave the indication anyway. Due to sheer luck, things turned out the way that they could make a massive fuss about it on stage at E3 which essentially puts everyone else at a disadvantage because Sony basically said, 'Do your thing, it's your own shit to deal with, we're not getting involved but this is what we're going to do.' They made that clear to everyone. There isn't some conspiracy. It's a big business, and the success of the PS4 is integral, so this isn't the kind of thing they were being wishy-washy about for the past couple of months.
Basically, MS are idiots and their PR skills made everything easier for SCE.
Now, unless all consumers are actually bloody morons, and you help make the Xbox One successful, and just show once more, that you really don't care about getting bended over, then you don't have anything to worry about. But if this shit doesn't mean anything, and you still make the Xbox One successful, accept the policies, allow MS to set such a ridiculous precedent, then a few years down the line, Sony have no reason not to play ball either because obviously, it's meaningless to you. They could then re-evaluate things for the US for example. Just bear this in mind. It's in everyone's hands now whether to fuck up or not.
SCE has one strategy which they have confidence in.
MS has a different strategy. If you're going to make this strategy successful, then obviously, another business is going to think they need to re-evaluate things.
