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?"

Comments

Just nonsense

[faragon]

And what about the sales lost because of annoying the *customer*? Greedy idiots.

Re:It's about killing the Pre-release

[Amphetam1ne]

I believe there has been talk in the past of not including a main game executable on the disk and only copies that have been activated at checkout will be able to download it. Obviously this doesn't account for things like review copies, beta leaks, etc.