I don’t think anyone thinks EA does give a rat’s ass about that. But, by the same token, if people don’t like EA’s sales model, they may not buy the game at all, and EA definitely is concerned about how many new copies of its games get sold.
I’m still interested to know why you think Gamestop should be “sued or violated some sort of law.”
For every person that doesn buy the game because they can’t resell it there will be ten people who buy a new copy that otherwise would have bought a usEd copy that would have made ea $0.
I’ll answer your second question lAter. I’m on my iPod righ now.
:dubious: You really don’t know anything about Microsoft, do you?
I see no-one has mentioned the effect this could have on renting games. Unless you wanna pay another $10 on top of the rental fee for multiplayer, anyway. I’m not sure how big of an effect game rentals have on sales numbers, but I know it’s one of the only things I envy that console gamers have and PC gamers don’t.
Anyway - I don’t personally particularly care about it either way, since I mostly play PC games (we’ve had keys to deal with for some time) and the only console games I ever play I don’t play online.
I’m actually surprised something like this didn’t happen sooner, and that it’s not going farther (need the key to play single player, for example) to be honest.
There’s no need to require a key for single player as console games require the disc, and it’s nearly impossible to circumvent that (unlike on PCs where it’s relatively easy)
They talked about 7-day trials for the online services, which I think takes care of any problems with the rental industry.
I wonder if this fee is EA’s alternative to shutting down game servers at an alarming rate.
With them pulling old online ones, too, I don’t doubt it. And Og forbid they allow ad hoc servers before it goes.
The second-hand PC Game market in Australia has been effectively dead for years primarily as a result of “online activation” DRM (such as Steam), making it nearly impossible to sell the game second hand, with a side order of the fact it used to be so easy to copy games that almost no-one would rent them or sell them second hand because people would just copy them and return them.
Having said that, there are still a few places that sell second hand PC games but they’re either very, very old ('90s) or stuff that likely either wasn’t a big hit when it came out anyway and doesn’t have any online DRM.
Seriously, what’s $5 or $10 anyway? $5 barely buys a milkshake these days. If you can afford a computer game in the first place, then just pay the $5 extra for the “new” version and accept you can’t sell it.
Personally, I’d like a $10 discount for an “offline only” version of the game, seeing as I never play online anyway, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen.
It’s not just online components. Some games are giving original purchases codes to download DLC that’s really just part of the game, so that second purchases either miss out on the content or have to give the developers money. Dragon Age comes with a DLC pack which has a valuable but non-critical role in the game, and the original purchaser gets a 1-time code to unlock it. If he resells it, the other guy has to pay $15 for the same content, or go without it.
What’s interesting to me is that piracy on the PC platform gets so much talk about how it affects the industry, but there’s not so much talk about second hand console sales. These things are not too dissimilar - in that the publisher/developer are getting no money from the sales, but you always hear about how piracy is killing PC gaming but rarely do you hear about used sales being a huge problem for consoles. Yet millions of people buy games used and the developers don’t directly see any money from that.
I don’t necesarily have a problem with this, but it should be reflected in the price - the game loses resale value and hence is a less valuable product. I get almost all my games through steam now, which is somewhat limiting in that it becomes impossible to resell the games if I wanted to, but I don’t really have a problem with this because I get crazy good prices on games so it works for me as a compromise.