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Sony Joins the Offensive Against Pre-Owned Games
BanjoTed writes "In a move to counter sales of pre-owned games, EA recently revealed DLC perks for those who buy new copies of Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Now, PlayStation platform holder Sony has jumped on the bandwagon with similar plans for the PSP's SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3. '[Players] will need to register their game online before they are able to access the multiplayer component of the title. UMD copies will use a redeemable code while the digital version will authenticate automatically in the background. Furthermore ... anyone buying a pre-owned copy of the game will be forced to cough up $20 to obtain a code to play online."
The sad thing about this is that, this has NOTHING to do with illegal distribution of games.
This has all to do with greedy corporations who keep moving towards the "software as a service" paradigm.
Nowadays, a lot of games you "buy" contain only a very small offline playing offering.
I only want a multiplayer videogame that I can play at home with my friends (at home two!). I just got the "Spyborgs" game for Wii... I haven't had so much fun in some time; it is the first "cooperative player with a history when playing both of them" I have been able to play (since I played Army of Two for PS3!).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
We used to buy a silver disk and it contained a game. As long there was an active userbase playing it, you would have multiplayer. Otherwise, you'd organize a night of multiplayer gaming with friends or play single player mode. But the game was yours to play.
If I look at it, the games industry is evolving to a SaaS-model; you pay a subscription fee on a games base and when you stop paying you are denied access.
it wouldn't surprice me, with latest Nvidea's realtime rendering farm et al, we'd soon have a subscribers base "gamers account", where you can pay monthly for "casual gaming", a more expensive "regular gaming"-account or "extreme all the latest games at fuckplenty fps"-account giving you access to certain titles/types of games which you can play realtime over wire.
Gaming like we've known before, on brown or silver disks, seems to be phasing out forever.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
If I pirate the game and then pay Sony $20 does that make it legitimate?
I just don't give a damn about the DLC. I played Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 all the way through without even noticing the little DLC registration cards in the box (typically those are just advertisements) until someone mentioned them. Both games were good and complete. The presence of free-if-you-buy-it-from-us DLC isn't going to motivate me to ignore a used game if it is available. What pisses me off is in-game advertisements for DLC. Every time you go back to camp in DAO some asshole is standing in the back with a bright yellow exclamation mark saying "Buy the DLC for my quest!". No, asshole, if you don't represent a playable part of my game, get the fuck out. I'm afraid we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future, as our (more profitable than ever) game companies continue to morph into greedy bastards like the rest of the entertainment industry.
I work for a one of the big european car manufactorer's. I can assure you that car manufactorer's have absolutely no interest in crippliing used cars sales.
If people could not sell their cars(to the dealer or to another user directly) they would keep using the same old car until it can. Car manufactorer's are instead very interested in people changing thir car every few years(2-3-5 are the most interesting spans), so they can seel a new one. People buyng a used medium size sedan are not likely to buy the same car new, while people changing their medium size sedan every 2-3 years are not likely to resort to used cars market(they clearly like having brand new cars), so there is very little overlap.
Also a used car is a very very different product from a new one. They have different values and there are many risks for non competent people buying 5 or more years old cars.
A car, even if there is no newer version, gets old with use and get less and less "useful" with time. There are very little istances of cars which are more than 10 years old and still good for everyday use, at least not without major maintenance(old fasghioned cars are a good example, if well kept they can be in perfect working order, but the cost of mantaining a 50's car in mint condition are very high. What you spend on it in 5 years is for syure much more than what you'd spend to buy a maintain a brand new car for the same time, and you'd have to factor that newer cars have better mileage, and much bettere safety systems, not to mention comfort).
Used games are the same, as long as the instalation media is not ruined they don't loose value due to use or abuse. The only limiting factor in a game value is aging, which is devalueing because newer better games come out. So These people just want to spend less money making new games, and keep milking old cows.
Car makers used not to have this problem up to a few years ago. they did start in the nineties to make new models every 2-3 years because they wanted to push obsolescence on their previous models just to sell more(they mostly succeeded here in europe).
The capacity and bitrate were the only advantage. On the other hand HD-DVD was a "finished" platform, with dozens of other advantages. It was doing dozens of things that simply wern't possible with the profile 1.0 (then later 1.1) BR disks. Its also pretty much given at this point, that putting java on the player has guaranteed that its been (and will be for the near future) a firmware upgrade/incompatibility nightmare. For a couple of years there, BR was just a scramble to throw in features (think picture in picture directors commentary, that required everyone except the PS3 owners to buy new players) when some hot HD-DVD title came out using a feature. I have a rule about my Blury player, if the disk I'm trying to play is newer than the firmware, then go to Sony's site and upgrade the firmware.
As someone familiar with the actual BR movie streams (chuckle) very few of them actually utilize more than single layer BR (25G) even when they are originally on dual layer. The extra capacity is almost always a second copy of the movie, or some extra crap encoded at 1080p originally filmed with a 480i camera. Even then, they generally come in under 30G (the default HD-DVD dual layer format). Frankly, even now, I can boot my HD-DVD player, drop a disk in and compare the "experience" with recent BR disks. HD-DVD continues to have more polish, and an unnoticeable quality difference. Part of that is the movie studios fault. For example, the default behavior for a HD-DVD is to start playing the movie (not previews) when the disk is inserted. If you want to select another audio stream (cause your system settings weren't correct) the popup menus over the movie allows you to do it dynamically while the movie is playing. The sequence for HD-DVD is "insert movie, watch movie", where is with BR, its "insert movie, fast forward through 3 commercials, navigate menus to start movie, watch movie". Then there are technology problems, for example, probably over 1/2 of the BR movies still can't be resumed from the middle, if you decide to finish watching at another time. This is apparently due to some issue with... wait for it.. the java (BD+?) running on the disks.
Finally, the hard coating was "required" because without it, the disks were to fragile as the data layer is right on the surface. I'm not sure that's an advantage. Someone could amended the CD, DVD or HD-DVD spec to require it too. It won't happen. It isn't necessary with those specifications as minor scratches don't ruin the disk. You can by DVD blanks with the same coating, but very few people do that either. If HD-DVD were still around, they probably would be using the scratch resistant coating to compensate for the error correction changes they were making right at the end to create 23G layers.
"In the US (YMMV) you have a right to do anything you want with your physical copy of the game (outside of making illicit copies). However, any rights for any subscription services are not "basic" - they depend on the contract/license for the service."
This is not true. We have the Doctrine of First Sale. If I pay for a game, that means all features. When I resell that game, the purchaser expects the exact same thing.
Forcing the second purchaser to pay extra money to access what should come with the game AS ADVERTISED is fraud in the purest sense.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.