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Study Claims Point-of-Sale Activation Could Generate Billions In Revenue
Late last year we discussed news that the Entertainment Merchants Association was pondering a plan to develop technology that requires games and movies to be "activated" when they are sold at retail outlets, primarily to reduce theft and piracy. Now, the EMA claims a study they commissioned has indicated that employing such a system for video games, DVDs, and Blu-ray products would generate an additional $6 billion in revenues each year. Critics of the idea are skeptical about the numbers, pointing out that the majority of game piracy comes from downloading PC games, which this plan won't even affect. There are other problems as well: "In order for benefit denial to work, the EMA would presumably require the three major consoles to have some sort of activation verification function to ensure that games were legally purchased. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft agree to that. There is also a lucrative market for used video games to consider. After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?"
This is about stopping used games sales, nothing more, nothing less
You know, they could make an additional six billion by creating games people actually want to play in the first place.
And what about the sales lost because of annoying the *customer*? Greedy idiots.
There is also a lucrative market for used video games to consider. After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?"
It won't handle that situation, because it's exactly the one they're really trying to stop. Illicit copying on consoles is a lot more difficult than PCs; it's always possible, but you're cutting out a big chunk of the potential copying going on if it requires a soldering iron to get it done. Publishers can afford to completely ignore illicit copying on consoles.
However, they can use "piracy" as a rallying cry to put in measures to kill the used game market.
Not a typewriter
There is also a lucrative market for used video games to consider. After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?
Simple: it will not be allowed.
You *really* think that they'd all the used market to exist if they had a choice?
Read this for an idea of what the game publishers think about the used market. (Yes, the guy is an obvious shill.)
How can you ever know how many pirates would ever purchase your product? I do think that piracy is hurting these companies, but they can't keep making the assumption that there's a goldmine of potential customers out there if only they figure out a way to make acquiring their products even more difficult. I'm pissed off enough with the way my HDMI connections constantly flake out or introduce annoying delays into my home theater setup. Now, how are people like my Luddite parents going to react to yet another hurdle? Content providers need to do some serious soul searching to see how many people they're deterring as opposed to the numbers they think they'll draw in from the shadows.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"In order for benefit denial to work, the EMA would presumably require the three major consoles to have some sort of activation verification function to ensure that games were legally purchased.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what they already do? I remember the original Xbox had a challenge response function signed with 2048bit RSA specifically designed to verify if the game was legitimate (regardless of homebrew implications). I fail to see how this generates anything except another spot for something to go wrong (ever have the cashier forget to give you change? Now have him forget to activate your $60 game).
Honestly, the best thing to combat piracy is to release better quality games. I'm looking at you EA (a.k.a. carbon copy gaming).
These people really are insane. They wont be happy until they can charge us every time an IP protected thought crosses our brain. The idea that IP is charged 'per brain' as it were, is slowly coming to be. No more sharing with friends, that would be illegal!
Good-bye
We would start buying the games again ahahha.
obligatory bam
it's just going to create a lot more overhead for the publishing companies, drive legid users already up in arms about draconic measures even more UP IN ARMS
for the tiny amount of people who quit because they can't be arsed anymore to keep up with latest crackin/copying techniques
... they figure out a way around the "I won't buy it" problem. The sales lost to "I won't buy it" and "I don't know you exist" and "I'm not really interested in your game" and "How much? You have got to be kidding" and "No, I won't buy you that game - you just had your birthday and Christmas is 5 months away" and "I really need to pay the rent - I can't buy that game right now" and "I'll just take a walk instead" and "Wow - that sounds like a great book - I'll buy that instead of that game" vastly outnumber the number of sales lost to piracy. Give people a reason to buy the game, and they will do so, should they be so inclined. Give people more reasons not to buy the game and they will gladly comply as well.
History shows that MS may be in favour of this judging by the way they seem to have bowed to big media and crippled the Zune's wireless functionality. The device would have been awesome had that been implemented in a non-crippled way. It goes without saying that this is right up Sony's alley, and it's surprising they haven't tried it themselves. I'm not sure how Nintendo would come in on something like this. I've heard people don't even have the homebrew channel disabled when they get a Wii back from repair, and Nintendo does carry a lot of market weight these days.
How will this work for people who don't have high speed internet? None of today DVDs, Blu-ray players, xboxs, ps3 have dial up and for some people that is all they can get.
will they have to use usb keys that act as Dongles?
The big retailers won't stand for the slowdown at checkout this would cause. Various schemes like this have been proposed before, and Wal-Mart isn't interested.
If everybody who wants activation at checkout, from cell phones to gift cards to videos, gets together and standardizes on a system, maybe.
Me walking away, disinterested in their attempts to lock me into a bad deal.
Looks like an industry needs a history lesson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX_(Digital_Video_Express)
The pressure is being put on the retailer. As a condition of selling the media, the retailer must agree to activating it.
Customer has a bad experience with the activation? No problem, blame the retailer.
This is just another example how big media is trying to circumvent the right of first sale. They would prefer that you aren't purchasing the product, but rather a non-transferable license to use the product. This effort must be thwarted at all costs, or pretty soon we won't be able to "own" anything...
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I realize my perspective on what the value of something is might be a little strange, but I hold that it is quite logical.
I don't buy diamonds primarily because of the blood and scandal associated with them, but also because of the resale value problem. "Used diamonds" sell for SIGNIFICANTLY less than "New diamonds." Why is that? The real and true value of diamonds must be closer to that of used diamonds than that of new. I also don't buy "new cars" for the same reason. There is a huge loss in price between the two states of new and used and it's not equal to or less than the value of the use I get from it in my opinion. Therefore new cars represent a big waste of money and is a bad investment... same as diamonds.
How does this reflect on the topic? Simple. This "activated at POS" notion serves only to limit or kill the resale potential for a single title. They seek to control not only the copyright, but also the access to the media. And without the possibility of being able to resell the games or music or movies one has purchased, you are looking at an even greater disparity between the first sale price and the resale value. When they decide a title is no longer available or eligible for activation, the owner's purchase becomes completely worthless. (And let's say a game activation was tied to an XBOX Live or similar account system and for whatever reason, the XBOX Live account is no longer available and the same person needs to create another account... will he be able to take his game activations over to the new account? I DOUBT IT. This could mean the loss of several hundred or possibly more than thousands of dollars of first owner cost at the discretion of the policy of the hosts of the accounts used to manage activations.) This is a step worse than the "DRM nightmares" that people have encountered when DRM content providers shut down servers or their servers fail or their data is somehow lost or corrupted resulting in the loss of access to content that the user legally paid for.
This is yet another way in which the public domain becomes a casualty of the greed of copyrighted content owners. We seriously need to crank up the volume when it comes to expressing the loss of the public domain to legislators. Large parts of our history and culture have been lost forever already due to the way copyright is abusing the public's good faith. (Yes, I said good faith because MOST consumers don't infringe on copyrights... MOST don't have a clue as to how they can even do it.)
The official PC market is 'similar' to this already. You get a code printed on the manual, and then when you install the game you 'activate' your code online.
That code is now used and it is tied to you.
The reason why you now never see any 2nd hand PC games in shops, is if you walk in with a physical game, with the manual, with the code - precisely as how it came - there's no way the poor guy in the shop can know if when he resells the game it'll work.
So they just drop the PC section and the console section gets just a little bit bigger.
I used to pirate stuff when I was a kid because I didn't have the money. Now that I'm an adult with a moderately decent job, I purchase everything legitimately. If this happens, I'll pirate again, but this time based on principle.
There is also a lucrative market for used video games to consider. After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?"
If I understand their reasoning correctly, that's part of the piracy they're trying to stop.
That's the useful part about calling coypright infringement piracy instead of copyright infringement: It has no real meaning, so it means whatever they want it to mean.
DVD players didn't have internet access. How exactly do they plan to implement such a ridiculous idea.
Just like pirated DVDs don't have long unskippable ads at the beginning...
"After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?" Why, it won't, of course. Isn't that convenient? Publishers never liked the "first sale" doctrine, but there's nothing they can do about it, from a purely legal point of view. So, a technical "solution" it is.
It's about stopping the pirates from getting the game much earlier than it's retail release date. Some studies have indicated that there is a good 10% extra to be had if you manage to have your 1st 3 days of release without a pirate version available. People who might have bought, but went for a pirate copy instead because they couldn't be bothered to drive into town for example. Most of the pre-release pirate games come from retail, where games may have been shipped to store anything up to 2 weeks before the street date. Employee's of games stores who have ties to scene release groups will purchase or borrow a pre-release game, upload it to the group who will crack it if necessary and then upload it to a private FTP where they hope to win points for being the 1st group to release. From there the game will be disseminated via the usual channels like torrents, usenet, rapidshare (aparently much to the disaproval of The Scene, who just do this to see who can get there 1st). Basicly for years the carefully craftd release scheduals and marketing plans of huge media companies have been screwed up by a bunch of teenagers having an e-penis waving contest. It's nothing new though, it's been happening for 20+ years and has it's roots in dial-up BBS'. There's a scene for virtually everything, not just games. Albums, singles, vinyl DJ promo's, DVD, Blu-ray, PC Apps, Mac apps, Music Production sample packs, they all have their own scene and their own set of groups that are fighting to be the 1st to get a pirate copy on the internet. This is where piracy comes from, not terrorism, not organised crime, just a bunch of teens playing a game against each other.
On the subject of the used market, publishers will be shooting themselves in the feet if they want to go ahead with killing the used market. It's estimated that a substantial number of new game buyers partially fund their games buying through trading in their old titles. So the loss of the used market will more than likely have a negative effect on new sales close to the value of
I think that peple need to realize that there is simply not an infinite amount of money in the ecconomy and that somwhere you reach a point where no more sales can be made until more cash flows back to the pockets of your customers. However, if you keep the money moving around fast enough, it can seem like there's an infinite amount of it.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
Seriously the moment I have to give out my personal info and spend 5 min at the check out to activate a MOVIE is the day I stop buying ANY entertainment and that includes going to watch movies at the movie theater. Just like I haven't bought any new music cd's for years although I love hitting up pawn shops and flea markets for dirt cheap music.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Every once in a while some greedy bald guy in a suit will have coffee with his buddies to talk about restricting content for profit, and this is one of those ideas.
Activating dvds, games, and anything else on a disc is absolutely impossible. Not every single hardware maker in the world is going to raise the cost of production to apply this crap to there devices.
Now lets look at some more facts. Not everyone has internet, you would have to replace or have seperate hardware for the "activated" media, and most people will partake in the acts that this move is trying to prevent.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The only real thing that needs to happen to completely lock down physical media on consoles is for a small portion of the disc to be writeable, and require retailers to write that with a specialized burner on purchase, containing all pertinent information including console serial number, date of purchase, place of purchase, etc etc. Encode/burn it in a way otherwise unreadable by normal players (like the Dreamcast's GD-ROM format, which was, to grossly over-simplify, more or less an inversion of the expected TOC with the data written backwards), give the console(s) in question the ability to read and require that track via firmware, and you have a completely locked-down, no-resale system that's directly tied to your console and your console alone. Charge an extra 50% per disc for "unlocked" versions to be used solely at video rental stores, perhaps with a re-writeable layer containing a date string to lock the game once the due-back date arrives.
Sure, it'd cost an arm and a leg and the soul of your first-born son, but who cares? You're saving yourself from PIRATES. Plus, you get all the benefits of the online distribution racket, too - Your friend wants to play? They need to get their own copy! You lost your disc? Buy another one, just like people who lost their accounts do! Console broke? Well, buy a new one and buy all your games again! Best of all, no pesky internet connection required to verify the license. That's a plus for the consumer!
Sure, you might be able to get around it, but good luck with that.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
This study was published by the Entertainment Merchants Association, which is a trade group for the retailers who sell and rent games. The members are companies like Toys R Us, Blockbuster, Target, etc. All the posts here read like the publishers are the ones sponsoring this study- eg this is the publishers trying to kill used sales.
I'm not convinced that is the motivation given that the merchants are the primary beneficiaries of used sales. For merchants, in store theft is a huge issue, and I imagine it was a primary motivation for at least starting this study on POS activation.
These guys are looking to a future where downloaded games reduce the need for physical retailers, and I'm sure they are scrambling to ensure their place in the world through whatever means necessary- including some dumb ideas like POS activation.
I stopped buying *new* games years ago. I have to worry about what "capitalistic malware infestation" the new PC games come with. Combine this with the shitty quality of newer games (Deus Ex Invisible War vs. Deus Ex) (Unreal 2 vs. Unreal) and its easy to see how the games of ten years ago were *so* much better. At least I have twelve years of great classic games to play. I miss games like Sin, Thief, DX, Unreal and Quake.
I also blame the XBOX for destroying two of my favorite franchises (Thief and DX). Everyone loves tiny environments and muddy textures. The future is sloppy ports of games that are unoptimized and cator to the lowest contender in terms of hardware and player IQ.
And more people will go the illegal route.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Console games are the bane of computing! Any innovation that drastically reduces the console game market, moving those people to netbooks and set top boxes is a massive boon for humanity!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Would generate an additional $6 billion in revenues for media corporations each year
or
Would consume an additional $6 billion in revenues from consumers each year
Greetings and Salutations....
Would generate an additional $6 billion in revenues for media corporations each year
or
Would consume an additional $6 billion in revenues from consumers each year
One thing that jumps out at me, when I look at these numbers is that, according to THIS source:
http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Gaming_mar06.aspx
the gaming software sales world wide is in the $30 billion area. However, It is unclear to me how this suggested change would be applied on
a world-wide basis. In the USA, according to THIS link:
http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Gaming_mar06.aspx
the sales are in the $6.2 billion area.
Now...are they claiming that 50% of the games running on consoles and PCs out there are stolen? That seems a tad high to me, especially since
one DOES need media of some sort to run on a console.
Also, in passing...the articles I read seemed to be focused more on the problems of physical theft from the stores, not downloading copies from the Net.
It would be very hard to attach a dye tag, or a large, lockable container, that would have to be physically removed by a clerk, to a downloaded file. However, if their GOAL is to start forcing consumers to purchase NOTHING but physical copies of the games, this might work.
Stopping shoplifting is one thing. Attempting to lock consumers into HAVING to buy the game from one source, with no competition is doomed to failure (look at IBM's example).
regards
dave mundt
Generate $6 billion in revenue for *whom*?
I'm guessing it isn't the game creators.
Maybe the company selling this product?
...Piracy jumps 8000% after plan is implemented. Seriously, this was tried with the DRM securvirus fiasco, people like me REFUSED to buy anything that had it on it, and drove everybody to get the pirated version. Not only that, people went to every site that had reviews of the games and nuked the reviews which hurt sales even more. EA finally relented and seems to have learned their lesson and not put any securcrap on their latest games (besides CD check). Go ahead and put this on your games/movies/others, they will learn soon enough what happens when a company gets too greedy the moment they do.
I don't think this is about a problem with piracy. Or stopping used games sales. This is about digital rights vendors trying to sell a product. They need studies like this to make their pitch to software developers.
Perhaps this is another ploy to manage peoples' expectations. If the latest iteration is so outrageous, then it makes the established practice (DRM) seem like a cuddly teddy bear.
I've heard people don't even have the homebrew channel disabled when they get a Wii back from repair
And I've read anecdotes to the contrary. People sending in a Wii console out-of-warranty to replace a broken disc drive (should be about $75 if that) are charged for essentially a new console because Nintendo detected a "Softwarehack".
If you as user don't want to pay more for your games, you'll have to switch to buying only older games that are no longer in the full price category. This also means that the publisher makes the sale half a year (or more) later. I wonder how the industry will like it if people do that ;-)
When one tries to play an older PS2 game online, it fails with DNAS error code -103: "This software title is not in service." I've seen this happen with even new-in-box games from the bargain bin, such as Konami's Dance Dance Revolution Supernova.
Studies claim that giving a ragtag group of misfits millions of dollars in equipment and ONE, LAST, CHANCE will save the entire planet! I see them all the time on tv, it must be true.
The guys over at Operation Sports will have roster updates for NFL 2k5 on the old XBox and PS2 consoles ready to go by September. http://www.operationsports.com/forums/espn-nfl-2k5-football/ Another year without having to buy Madden!
because as noted before. Stuff like Steam and the MS, Sony and Nintento Online distribution methods are proving to be a gigantic competition for the distribution chains (which happen to be owned, just like with movies and music, the big publishers).
Its not only piracy thats taking away money from hardcopy distribution but everything online.
Just like with movies and music, the big money publishers are stuck in their old ways, can't and won't evolve to not needing 90% of the people they employ and 99% of the distribution buildings and transport methods they own.
Dropping their old ways would mean getting rid of most of their assets and a whopping lot of their turnover.
Because they didn't evolve with the rest of the world, they are stuck in a possition where they are in their entirety obsolete and could be cut out as a middle man without any problems.
Just like with the movie and music corps, they are showing their final kicks and trashes while dying a very painfull death.
They prefer blaming their failing bussines on Piracy and filesharing, while its their own damn fault because they opted for maximum profit without regard to the fact that route would mean their death.
Code a (stupid) activation function because you (think you) can.
This is called, of course, blind hacking. Some people can't tell the difference between a computer and a magic box.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You forget, EMA, that that extra $6B IS ALSO GOING TO BE THE $6B THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO SPEND ON GAMES THE NEXT TIME AROUND!
I may be exaggerating, but meh.
Well, this new activation scheme may be a good thing. After they put that into effect, the cracking groups will become so popular that they'll establish their own publishers who won't deal with this crap.
Some of you seem to be missing the point here. 99% of retailers keep their stock(vg/accessories) behind a locked cabinet/doors. If someone is stealing that they're friggin Houdini. So no, this isn't to stop theft. This isn't to deter piracy(as expected) this is to generate revenue streams from retailers. This isn't about you and me, it's about them and them. These services aren't free and the creators of a mainstream system will generate millions in revenue without actually doing much. Yeah they're system will break down and you won't be able to activate or re-activate a game or movie when you want to but that's not their problem now is it?
I don't see this doing anything but making the sale take longer and possible stop some in store thefts. This has nothing to do with piracy and it will have no effect on the used game market. A place like Gamestop that makes most of it's business on used games will have no incentive to deactivate a game before selling it again but would have every reason not to. Also I've heard nothing about any possible deactivation (and honestly if they are expecting that then they're completely batshit). In the end this will just be annoying and maybe stop some retail loss but will not increase revenue because that kid that just stuck a copy of GTA down his pants when nobody was looking won't magically have sixty bucks hidden in the same spot.