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Vital Parts of Games As DLC?
Epic Games president Michael Capps did an interview recently with GamesIndustry, and he had some interesting things to say about the future of downloadable content, and how it will affect the retail games market. He also discussed the trend toward social gaming, and Epic's plans in that regard. Quoting:
"I'm not sure how big it is here [in Europe], but the secondary market is a huge issue in the United States. Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales, and so you're starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by ... if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code. I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free.' We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used — way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it."
Do they seriously think their customer base will stand for behavior like that? Anyone who has ever bought a used game will cease to buy any games, new or used, by companies that try to pull this shit. Consumers don't like being raked over the coals.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Not only that, money-grubbing whores who have said they're turning their backs on the very fans that propelled them to success (PC gamers). Fuck those guys.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
... a large printing company has started replacing the last page in it's books with a 900 number readers must call to find out the ending. Apparently the greedy buzzards weren't making any money when people checked books out at the library.
Ok, they want to kill of rental and used games. Fine. Doesn't matter to me.... but the value of games as a bought item like a DVD or book is a lot higher to me than a non-tranferrable license. Price accordingly and I'll bite. Oh! You idiots thought we are going to keep paying $60 and not be able to loan it out to a friend or turn it at Game Stop? That's very different, that is just a big old price increase heading into a recession. Brilliant move guys!
Democrat delenda est
Doctrine of first sale still applies to other properties that can be purchased and re-sold, despite the fact that authors make no money off sales of used books, nor Ford off sales of used cars and trucks.
Its like the music industries attitude problem has somehow infiltrated the thinking of other digital organizations worldwide.
Harry Potter will have had way more readers than it had sales (probably more than twice as many) before accounting for privacy at all.
"Get over it" comes to mind.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
"We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used".
Welcome to the real world! Want to be rich? Keep working!
No, god no. I don't frankly care if it reduces my costs overall. I'm fed up with this contract culture, where anything worth doing requires agreeing to terms that frankly, nobody understands. I want to have some control -- not to be bound to a million different obnoxious companies. Look at all the nightmares when people try to unsubscribe to AOL, for example. Now multiply it a hundredfold.
Behold the future of gaming: using DLC as a form of DRM.
We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used -- way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it."
So what? A car manufacturer doesn't make money when a second hand car is sold. An actor doesn't get more money when a movie is rented.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
This fiction that every time a product is used, the people who made said product deserve to be compensated just shows up how greedy these people are. It's never worked this way before, and if you take this position and have ever bought anything second hand you're a hypocrite. Get a clue.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Perhaps if enough people aren't willing to purchase your game at full retail, your retail price is too high for the product you are selling?
There's a reason GameStop, etc are basically pawn shops these days - they figured out that there's a whole lot more people willing to buy the games at roughly 30% off retail.
But no, your answer is to try and kill secondary sales.
I honestly hope you do, in some ways, as then you'll see that your logic is equally as flawed as the RIAA's and that each "secondary sale" or rental isn't someone who would have purchased it at full retail otherwise.
Let's see, why would I sell a game... Hmm... Would I sell Civilisation II? Nah, I might want to play it again. Would I sell Alpha Centauri? Are you nuts, that game can still be a blast (provided you find a machine able to run it)! I also couldn't see myself selling my copy of Supreme Commander.
If you don't want your players to buy their games used, give your gamers a reason NOT TO SELL THEM. Simple as that. You can only buy used what others offer you. Replay value is what you're looking for. Of course, if you offer games that can be done in less than 10 hours and give the player zero incentive to play it again (EA, I'm looking your way!), the temptation to dump the game back onto the market before it loses too much value is quite high. Hey, if I buy it offshore and get it past customs, I might even sell it without a loss!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's been A LOT of negative stuff with regards to games--mostly on the PC site. DRM, DLC that's promised and never delivered, poor quality. You know something else? None of these seems to have any real effect on sales.
Spore still sold millions of copies. Mass Effect sold well. As much as people SAID "Oh, I'm not buying this DRM crap" or "I hate these buggy games", they are still selling by the millions. Could these titles have sold BETTER if they didn't have all these negative points? Maybe, maybe not.
As soon as you have a major title that comes out, that will have some code like this...people will still buy it. And if publishers can put these kind of restrictions on games, why shouldn't they do it? There's no downside.
As far as piracy, or even renting goes(and when did THAT become evil)..it's limited to people that never really planned on buying it anyways. Those aren't lost sales despite what their studies say. The vast majority of people still still just go to a store and buy it. Good games still sell well. A cry of "OMG PIRACY KILLED OUR SALES" from a publisher is just trying to defend a bad title. Maybe Crysis would have sold better if it actually ran on more than 10% of the PCs sold at the time.
Expect these things to continue. Also expect them to be tolerated by the gaming public. All that crying about SecuROM is going to go away when Mirror's Edge comes out and you HAVE to play it. Having to have some code to get the last level of a game will be cried about on every forum--until Bioshock 2 has one. And it will sell millions of copies.
What can anyone do about it? Nothing. What COULD everyone do? Ignore the game. Don't pirate it. Don't purchase it. Don't talk about it on forums. But that won't happen. Most will happily take whatever the game publisher does to them just so they can have that shiny new version of their favorite game.
I don't know, if you were in the middle of sex and suddenly she stops and refuses to continue unless you pay the "climax fee" of $20, in the heat of the moment you probably would pay.
Grandparent is actually correct: As you note, first sale applies. However, there is nothing stopping you from making some other agreement. In the case of movie rentals, the peculiar economics of movie production often makes this a preferable arrangement.
If you are a rental place, buying movies at retail makes it very expensive to build up a large collection, particularly obscure stuff that will take ages to recoup the initial investment, or the bursty demand for new, popular, releases. Instead, you can establish a revenue sharing agreement with the studio, who will furnish you with as many copies of a given title as you need at the cost of pressing, which is trivial, and then share the revenue from each rental.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118972449/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16851899
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=258
We only sold 5.3 million copies of Gears of War. At $60 a piece, that's a mere $300 million, give or take, in gross receipts. Our top executives can barely afford the maintenance costs on their exotic Italian sports cars. Please, think of the execs!
Regards,
Greedy Assholes
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Kid "Mom, I need your credit card to pay Blizzard $20 so I can defeat the final level boss Cement Head in Worlds of Warcraft Junior: Adolescence Rage"
Mom "What? You need my credit card for what? A video game?"
Kid "I also need $15 more to buy a magic sword +5 against cement."
Mom "But that's extortion, who does Blizzard think they are to charge money to get to the final level and buy a weapon to help you defeat a boss, and what kind of name is Cement Head anyway?"
Kid "But moooooooom, all the kids in Junior High are playing it, and if I don't beat Cement Head, I'll be laughed at lunch by all of my friends because my family is too poor or too stingy to pay for unlocking those parts of the game."
Mom "Well if they laugh at you dear, then they aren't your friends. I am not paying $35 for you to finish some stupid video game."
Kid "But Mom, G4 'Cheat' gave it five out of five stars, the highest rating they can give it."
Mom "I don't care who gave it five stars, I am not giving you my credit card and that is final!"
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I'm glad these guys aren't in the business of selling books, imagine how ape shit they would go if they learned about these places called libraries, that buy the book once, then lend it out free to whoever wants to read it? Hundreds, even thousands of people getting enjoyment from 1 sale, we better make laws against it fast, or book publishing will be doomed for sure!
Despite all their commercial success, Epic (especially cliffyb) seems determined to find excuses why their games aren't the highest selling entertainment product of all time. The PC version of Gears of War stunk, it had framerate and screen tearing issues, lots of bugs, and little to no effort put into adapting it to PC controls. When the sales stunk, they blamed piracy on the PC. Im sure when GoW 2 comes out, and doesn't outsell Halo, GTA , and Madden combined in the first week, he will blame modchips or paid off/bribed reviewers from Sony or whatever other thing he can come up with to massage his own ego. They owe a lot of their success to Id, who basically created the mold for their early games, but if you listen to them talk you'd think they are god's gift to gamers, bringing them ideas so innovative only truly inspired artists could come up with them, like a first person shooter where you fight aliens with guns, and chainsaws, and chain-saw guns.
Apparently Ford cant make money off the FIRST sale of cars and trucks.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...except here Epic is fucking you.
Read Pynchon.