Slashdot Mirror
How Politics Interacts With Games
Crispy Gamer sat down with Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumer Association, and had him explain how the games industry interacts with various aspects of the government, such as lobbying efforts, the supreme court, and particular politicians. A related editorial suggests some things President Elect Obama can do to bring change to the industry. "We also need to rein in the used games market and not with DRM. It is fundamentally unfair that developers are being robbed of profits for work that they've done. If the ESA will not offer a mandate, then we'll need the government to do so. Publishers and developers should be entitled to at least half of the price from the sale of every used game." Kotaku has a response which points out flaws in the author's arguments.
Money grabbing bastards. If it wasn't for trade-ins and 2nd-hand game sales a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford games and with this mandate, prices of used games would go up and the value of trade-ins would go down. If they want more people buying new games, how about not making them cost £50 a pop for a new next-gen game?
If they want to make money off of used games, sell some worthwhile DLC. By that, I don't mean CliffyB's idea of selling the final boss to 2nd hand buyers, I mean add-ons to the main game. I doubt Harmonix worry about used-game sales of Rock Band because if they love the game, they will buy more songs.
The only way I want to see politics and games interact is with Sarah Palin being blown up in Mercenaries 2.
"developers are being robbed of profits for work that they've done" This is absolutely brilliant. [/sarcasm] How about developers come up with content that will hold users' attention long enough so used games won't directly compete with their new counterparts? A lot of people I know hold on to the good games they get because they might want to play again in the future. By the way, can I return a game after I have installed it because I'm not satisfied with its features? Like, when I don't like how the game responds, or because it has below standard artistic value, or simply because the game isn't nearly as fun as it was advertised to be? The game industry gets away with too much bullshit already. I'm not about to have them milk me for money like I'm some dairy cattle.
Absolutely. I will gladly pay +$60 dollars for a quality title and will be proud to have it in my collection till the day I die. I never sell games, just like I never sell books. It's just not worth it to lose an item of such high quality. It's practically blasphemous.
True AAA games rarely get sold, and when they do, it's for a premium. The original God of War still sells for $30 on the second hand market. Titles like these are the reason things like the sony platinium series were created, so that developers could still make money off quality titles long after the initial release. And it works! The original Starcraft is still for sale, 10 years after it was released.
Video games, despite popular opinion, do not become outdated. True classics shine through time and pixelation. Frankly, the danm things age like wine in many instances. But of course, to become a classic, you actually need to be a very good game, which brings us to our original point. Developers want a quick buck through marketing tripe rather than long term revenue from brilliant titles. Naturally, my heart bleeds for them.
May the Maths Be with you!
More importantly, part of the value of a game is its resale value. When people buy a car they take into account how much it's likely to be worth in three, five, ten years' time when they want to sell it. You'd be much more likely to stump up $50 for a game if you were pretty sure you could sell it for $30 on Ebay or Amazon a few months later. The game publishers should be encouraging this secondary market.
I suppose one difference is that there is no piracy of cars; you can sell it to another person and they now own it. You can do that with a video game too, but it's sooo tempting just to leave a backup copy on your own computer. If you accept the principle of copyright, which is that making a copy requires special permission and this is how the authors and publishers make money, then a market in 'secondhand' games which are really just pirate copies doesn't help the industry or, in the long run, encourage development of new games.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com