I’m surprised it took them this long to come up with something. Look, gamestop has like 5000 retail locations in the US, tens of thousands of employees, profit, etc. All of that money is coming out of the pockets of the people who actually created the game. People rave about how PC piracy is killing the industry (and it’s a legitimate problem, I’m not trying to downplay it) - but rarely do people talk about used game sales, which are effectively the same thing. You’re getting the game without giving a cent to the people who produced it.
This seems like an obvious problem that needs a solution, so I’m not surprised by this and quite frankly don’t really blame them. Of course I can view this dispassionately, because I don’t buy console games. PCs moved on to a better method of distribution long ago and I’ve already got more games than I could ever play for less than what console users pay for a dozen or two.
So good for them, I’d rather the money go to the developer than gamestop. The process of reselling new games that are $60 instead for $55, and giving nothing back to the publisher, is fairly abhorrent - and it sucks that consumers won’t pay the extra money to make sure that the people who made the game they enjoy so much get something for it. I know if I strictly bought used games, I wouldn’t feel as if I were any ethically better than just pirating them - although I guess you could make a case that it injects more money into the game buyer’s pocket to buy new games.
Of course if that raises console game prices across the board, that’s fine with me too. People may realize how insanely cheap pc games are compared to consoles and flock that way. Or consoles may just integrate digital distribution better into the next gen anyway - as Kinthalis says, whatever the consoles come out with is just going to mimic whatever PC gaming was doing 5 years ago.
But if I want another copy of Secret of Mana, do you suppose that Square Enix is gonna be able to sell me one? Hell, I’d love to get a port of the game. Right now, though, if my cart’s battery dies, my only option is to either buy a used cart or play a ROM. Neither of these options is gonna put money into Square’s pockets.
SenorBeef, would you, in your glee, shut down libraries and used book stores at the same time? Authors deserve to get paid, too, don’t they? I’m curious as to the limit of your appreciation in this matter.
Possibly not the best example as they did port it to IOS recently. As well as to the Wii’s virtual console. The point stands though. Especially for games from smaller companies or companies that don’t remake, port, and rerelease everything constantly like Square.
I don’t buy the premise used sales hurt publishers to begin with though. Used sales make new game purchasers less cautious. When I was a kid almost every new game I bought was partially funded with store credit for selling an old game. I rather doubt I was unique in that. Get rid of the used market and many new game purchasers may buy less frequently.
I don’t think it’s going to happen. It can only work if all the console manufacturers buy in on it. If one doesn’t go for it, the market advantage of being the only console that lets you play used games is going to be overwhelming. And even then, it can only work if A) all the consoles hit the market at the same time, and B) they each share an equal amount of the market.
Being the first console in a generation to get to market is a big advantage. It’s hard to get people to jump to a different system in the middle of a console’s life time. If MS’s next console comes out a year ahead of Sony, and has this DRM, Sony’s going to need every advantage it can get to convince people to switch to the PlayStation, and being the only console that can play used games would be a huge advantage. Similarly, if one console starts lagging seriously behind, the sales boost they’d get for dropping the DRM would be hard to pass up.
I doubt it will get that far, though. I don’t think either company is going to go through with this.
I have no real dog in this fight; i don’t game on the console or on the PC.
But, like erislover, i’d be interested to know where your moral and ethical boundaries are on this issue. There are thousands of used car dealers in the United States; should those dealers be closed down in order to guarantee a greater revenue stream to the auto companies? What about second-hand bookstores? Used CD/DVD stores? How about eBay or Craigslist or Amazon Marketplace? Or second-hand clothing stores?
My last photography-related purchase was an AF 105/2.8D Micro-Nikkor lens, which i got for about $400 from a seller on Craigslist. It’s a few years old now, but it’s in excellent condition, the glass quality is still great, and i’ve taken some nice pictures with it. Should i have been required to walk into an authorized Nikon outlet and pay $899 for the latest version of this lens? Should there have been a self-destruct mechanism installed in the lens i purchased, so that it would detect a transfer of ownership and render itself useless? Am i stealing from Nikon by buying used?
Because, in terms of the moral and ethical issues we’re discussing here, basically the only difference between video games and other types of products is that the other products do not offer a readily-available technological barrier to transfer of ownership.
Closed down by whom? Should the government send in squads to blow these places up? No. If the makers of the product could somehow engineer an inability to resell their product? Sure, why not?
Besides which, cars and lenses are bad analogies. The value of those things is in the actual physical, usable product, whereas the value of a game is in informaton. The actual media the game comes on is almost irrelevant and without value. It makes no economic sense to throw away a used car to force people buy new ones, whereas whether people have to buy a DVD or a digital download is almost trivial - nothing is really lost with the loss of a DVD. Books are a much better, and closer analogy.
The reason a used car costs $10,000 or a used lens costs $400 is because that device was considerably expensive to make, and the value of the device is stored within the device itself. With a game, the production cost of the actual DVD and box is trivial - the cost really comes from the effort to develop the game in the first place. This makes a model in which the value is invested in the actual physical media - the DVD - rather than a license to the information - distorted.
When gamestop sells you a $55 used game instead of a $60 new one, where is the $55 worth of value coming from? Certainly not the CD and case they’re going to sell you. It comes pretty much entirely from the information stored on that disk. And that’s what makes it fundamentally different from products like cars and lenses, where it’s the actual item that’s inherently valuable and useful.
And gamestop has done nothing to create or compensate for that informaton. They’re riding free on the work of others, who go uncompensated. A system whereby a new $60 game sends, I don’t know, $20? to the publisher, whereas a new $55 game sends $0 is rather perverse.
The better way to do it is to charge for the information, and make the physical product irrelevant. This is what digital distribution does - sure, you can’t resell your games, but that seems like an exceedingly minor gripe to me when it also means that you pay about 10-20% as much for them, and not only that, but the creators of the games still get more money.
From what I’ve seen, though, I DO have to pay full retail price for digitally distributed games…unless I’m willing to play another game, which is called “checking the prices constantly”. I don’t find any enjoyment in this second game, and I resent having to play it.
And I LIKE having physical media. I don’t like digital distribution, and I wish that I could still get the kinds of games that I want in physical media. I realize that I’m dreaming of getting a unicorn for my next birthday, but just because I’ll buy stuff in digital form does NOT mean that I like it, or enjoy the process.
<sucks her gums and remembers the Good Old Days of Infocom’s feelies>
How about i hand you a two-ton pile of metal, plastic, rubber, and wires, then? You can put your car together yourself. This would include, of course, working out how to machine all the pieces, and then construct them in a way that would produce a vehicle that would be safe, efficient, comfortable, and reliable.
Auto companies invest a considerable portion of their capital in research and development, in the very same sort of intellectual work that produces a video game. Engine specifications, aerodynamics, ride, handling, ergonomics, aesthetics—all of these are studied and researched at both abstract and experimental levels by car companies, and this type of work goes on throughout each company, both as an overall effort towards company improvement, and also as a specific application to each particular model of vehicle.
Yes, the nature of this work is a little different in its scope from the work that goes into the development of a video game, and it also constitutes a smaller percentage of the overall value, but it’s simply incorrect to say that the cost of a vehicle reflects only the parts and the labor that went into putting the physical object together.
I suspect i could find a bunch of auto executives and shareholders who might disagree with you.
When you say it “makes no economic sense,” you need to realize that these are normative issues we’re dealing with here, and that what makes sense to one person may not make sense to another, depending upon where those individuals’ interests lie, and what constitutes their definition of “economic sense.”
It seems just as logical to me to say that it makes “no economic sense” to force me to buy a new game when my neighbor has finished with his and is willing to exchange it with me for some financial consideration.
OK, let’s stick with books then. Should used bookstores be made illegal? Would you overturn the doctrine of first sale as it applies to hard copies of things like books?
What about software that is intended for some sort of productivity, versus software for gaming? What i mean here is that some (in fact, many) games have a finite end-point, a place where the game finishes, and where playing it again means basically going through the same things that you’ve already done. By contrast, something like Photoshop is a tool for undertaking certain types of work, with no defined endpoint.
If i finish playing my copy of Tomb Raider 3 or Myst: Exile (yes, that’s where my gamer life stopped), i have basically completed the game. I’ve arrived at the end, and you might reasonably argue that i’ve received my full measure of value from it. But Photoshop has no such story arc or teleology; it is simply a tool for manipulating images. Should both of these things be treated the same? And if not, why not?
It seems to me, also, that a book is more like a game than a piece of productivity software, in that once you finish a book you’ve extracted pretty much a full measure of value from it. Wouldn’t the logical extension of your principle be that we not only should be forbidden from reselling these items, but we should also be allowed to use them only once? When you get to the end of Myst, the game should automatically delete itself from your computer. When you get to the end of the book, it should disintegrate in your hands.
Right, but this begs the question: why is the information you have purchased here different from other things that you purchase? Once you are done with it, in whatever form it happens to exist, why is it not yours to dispose of as you like?
I get your point, and part of the sale cost of the car is in the R&D, but I’m saying that a working car is inherently a valuable piece of equipment, in and of itself. A DVD is is just a medium, a trivial part of the process - the value of the object doesn’t lie with the DVD at all.
I mean economic sense on the macro scale. If we just discarded working cars whenever the owners felt like buying a new one, tons of value would be lost. We’d be throwing away valuable pieces of equipment. However, if we simply discarded DVDs when an owner was done with it, or if the person just owned a license to use the software, almost nothing is actually lost. We don’t lose non-trivial economic value by insisting that everyone who owns a video game pay the producer, whereas we’d lose a ton of economic value discarding used cars.
You can treat them however the contract says you can treat them. Does photoshop’s licensing agreement forbid reselling the software? I would suspect yes. Same deal as a console maker then who licenses games/information to people rather than ownership.
First, where is all of this “forbidden” stuff coming from? You seem to be saying that I suggested a law saying that no one could resell their video games, and I haven’t remotely hinted at supporting that. We’re talking about the console makers on their own making a contractual agreement with the people using their products, and the end user agreeing to the terms. If book makers could somehow manage to do this, they might - and in fact, with digital book delivery systems, we have exactly that - I’m under the impression that you generally can’t give away paid copies of digital books, for instance.
I’m not suggesting anyone should be forbidden from anything. If the console makers want to design their consoles in such a way as to sell game licenses rather than game ownership to the consumer, then the consumer can decide if that works for them. If enough consumers decide that’s not worth it, then it won’t be a sustainable policy.
Because again, the value comes from the information, rather than the physical device. It makes sense to treat them differently. Treating games as licenced usage of intellectual property lines up the incentives better with rewarding the creator of those games - society is better off if all of the money that’s currently going to gamestop instead goes to the people making games.
In theory, that would end up resulting in more revenue for the creators of games, and more room for those creators to reduce prices on their products to account for that. We actually have this in the PC digital distribution world - games cost us less, and yet more of our money makes it back to the people creating the games - but this is in part because it’s a competitive market. Sony and Microsoft are much more in control of their products and less likely to compete on that basis, so the future isn’t as bright in their case.
As a PC gamer, the situation outlined in the OP has been the reality for about five years or so now- I think the last major PC game I can recall coming out that didn’t need online authentication or something like Steam, Origin, or Games For Windows Live to function was Fallout 3, and that was in 2008.
So whilst I sympathise with console gamers who won’t be able to rent games or get second hand ones if the situation in the OP happens, it’s hardly a unique situation. They’ll just have to do what I and many other PC gamers do- wait six months for the game to drop in price.
Nope, just wait a little while. Looking on the front page of Steam, Rayman: Origins is 30 bucks. Searching, Portal 2 is 20. I can guarantee you those weren’t their original full retail prices.
And as an aside, there are 1.5k games under 10 bucks, many of which are fully fleshed-out, 50-hour games that are simply old. You’re not going to find those kinds of deals at the local Gamestop.
Me, too, pretty much; at least in the sense that I won’t buy a new console for years. By the time they stop making games for the current gen, I’ll have kids and minimal time anyway; PC gaming will be enough.
Won’t say “never,” but I’ll probably skip a generation, and buy my son a PS 5 in 2022. Hopefully by then someone will find a workaround.
Quite a lot of them are new, too, they’re just remaindered.
However, they are worth about four bucks to me. They certainly aren’t worth forty or fifty bucks, in most cases. The thing is, many people and companies vastly overestimate what their products and services are worth to other people. My brother-in-law, for instance, believes that he should be earning about $30 an hour for menial labor. Just because he thinks he’s worth that much, doesn’t mean that he IS worth that much. I think that I’ve made my position on ebook pricing pretty clear, too.
Yes, everyone involved should get paid. However, they have to price the product in accordance to what the market will bear. Remember Divx?
Well, what i mean is that the companies forbid the consumer from disposing of a product that he or she has purchased in a manner that he or she sees fit. The doctrine of first sale says that, with all other types of products, once a person purchases the product, they have a right to sell it or hand it off to someone else. The question, i guess, is why the companies should be allowed to engage in a form of transfer that effectively circumvents this law.
Also, the very nature of this contractual agreement is still in something of a legal flux. There have been court cases where software companies have attempted to prevent resale of their products, arguing that the products were not sold but only licensed, and in some cases the courts have found that what took place was really a sale, no matter how much the company argues otherwise. There have also been cases where the courts have found for the companies, arguing that the transaction was, in fact, a licensing rather than a sale. If i go to the Adobe website right now and look at the Photoshop page, the little button next to the product doesn’t say “License” or “Rent,” it says “Buy.”
Look, i don’t have much of a stake in this. I’m sure you’re right that the no-resale/digital distribution model does bring down the new price, and ensure that a greater percentage of the money spent on games makes its way to the makers. But it seems to me that you still haven’t provided a very compelling reason why these particular creators should be protected more than the original creators of other types of products.
You also never really addressed the issue of products like books. You said, in an earlier post, that they provided the closest comparison to software, and it seems to me that the actual paper is a relatively small cost of the creation of a book. Would you support a model that made it impossible to sell used books?
I agree with Miller. I would be surprised if this happened in the next generation of consoles. It was probably a trial balloon the companies put out to see what public reaction would be. Not only because of Miller’s excellent reasoning, but because of Gamestop. Gamestop sells plenty of product for the console makers, in addition to their used games section. So, don’t think Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are ready to piss them off.
On the other hand, they will continue to focus on downloaded games. Which accomplishes the task of making things one user only. In addition, for disc based games they will continue offering certain DLC options only to the original purchaser.
At first I didn’t care much about this idea. I didn’t love it, but since I usually wait a few months or a year and pick up a game new for a much cheaper price from Amazon it didn’t affect me quite as much. (It would if they decided to switch to solely selling online content.) Then, I realized a friend and I have a nice habit of giving each other games after we are finished with them. This, obviously, would have to stop. So, now I really hope they don’t do it. I’ve played some of my favorite games this way. Games I didn’t think I would enjoy, but, once I tried out I loved.
I don’t think the game makers are far off in what the market will bear. Considering the fact that, as **SenorBeef **mentioned, Gamestop sells used games for $5.00 cheaper than a used one. And, somehow, people pay that price for a used game. I don’t claim to understand it, but it seems to work. If used games can sell for such a high price, I’m guessing that the market for the new product is well priced.
I don’t care much about playing used Xbox games (I’ve stopped buying games used after having been burned several times). But I don’t like the suggestion that I might be forced to connect my Xbox to the internet in order to play games.