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Sony Introduces 'PSN Pass' To Fight Used Game Sales
Gamasutra reports that Sony has introduced "PSN Pass" — one-time codes that will unlock complete online access for certain games. "The company didn't offer details on how used and rental players would access online features in these titles, but did clarify that first-party use of the passes will be decided on a game-by-game basis." The initiative is similar to the "Online Pass" that EA rolled out last year, and to Sony's own experiment with SOCOM 4. Sony's explanation for the Pass will probably leave you wishing Google Translate supported marketing-speak: "This is an important initiative as it allows us to accelerate our commitment to enhancing premium online services across our first party game portfolio."
"These games don't have monthly subscriptions because that only works with mmo games. This means the game company is fully dependant on the income from game sales."
Keep it in perspective: Sony (or whatever company involved for game X) will shut the server for that particular game down after X months or X years REGARDLESS of used or new game sales. It will be done. As such, this point you're making means nothing. They spend X dollars putting the server up. They base this off of new game sales, fine. BUT. In order for a used game to connect to this server, it means there's one less "new" game connecting to it. To put it simply, the total number of games bought will stay the same. The game will go offline after the same amount of time anyway so WTF screw with used games sales.
I remember a time when games where made to be fun in single player mode. Some of them had a multiplayer mode that didn't requre internet access.
I like that sort of games and that is the kind of games I will buy.
Maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture here, but what difference does it make, from the perspective of the game publisher, whether I play the game for 2 years, using the services provided, or I play the game for 1 year and someone else plays the game for another extra year? The game has been payed for, and that includes the 'right' to the services for however long I wish (and whichever corporeal body I reside in).
I think that such a generator would break one of the Linguistodynamic Laws, it being a perpetual drivel machine.
These games don't have monthly subscriptions because that only works with mmo games. This means the game company is fully dependant on the income from game sales. When people resell their game the game developers get nothing, so they also have less incentive to support online games.
Thanks for the astroturfing, man, but your argument doesn't even make sense. The game developers also get nothing if the original owner continues to play the game.
Do I get reimbursed if I buy a game and stop playing after three months? Of course not, so why should the game developers get to double-dip if people play it for longer than anticipated?
Or consider books. I also own books I haven't finished even once. I don't pay more for the former, and I don't get money back for the latter, and in either case, if I resell a book, the publisher gets nothing. Or how about cars (we love car analogies)? I got a Ford, and if I resell it, Ford doesn't get anything, despite the fact that it costs them an opportunity to sell a new vehicle. Should I really be allowed to resell an object, for no other reason than that it is MINE?
And all that hand-wringing about how running servers costs money (not to mention things like security - and we all know how much money Sony invests into these things, right)... if game developers have a problem with that, let them charge a monthly fee. That's fair and transparent, and people can decide whether to buy a game or not then.
I didn't miss PSN much either really when it disappeared. Am I core gaming market or disposable fuddy duddy?
I spend a lot for the game, so I don't like to subsidize freeloaders. It's only fair that they also pay a little to get online access, which is a recurring cost for the game company.
But you don't pay extra as a customer to keep with the upkeep of the game. In fact, this all sounds like the battle with RIAA and music piracy. How many used game buyers would buy the game used anyways? Should the people who buy the game on sale also be counted as free loaders? They didn't pay the full price. What about game monitoring, I buy the game and play it a few times and forget about it for two years. Should I get reimbursed since I didn't utilize the services?
Yes, there is an ongoing cost with keeping servers and whatnot running. The problem with the access being tied to the first sale of the game is that Sony is admitting they don't expect everyone to play the game online. This is even more benign than music piracy. It is a person giving up access to a game they legally bought to another to play in their place. Saying this puts undue hardship on the online portion of a game is saying anyone keeping a game and playing it thoroughly is putting undue hardship on the company.
I usually miss something small and stupid. I can see the argument, though I don't like it, of using this tactic to counter perceived hurt sales due to the resale market. I just don't see how rentals and resales hurt a company's upkeep unless they are taking advantage of casual players and thus the "hard core" are the free loaders.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Game company using this technology to restrict any access to the game whatsoever to the first buyer in 3... 2...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
whether I play the game for 2 years, using the services provided, or I play the game for 1 year and someone else plays the game for another extra year
In theory, there are no difference.
In reality, almost no one plays for 2 years : most players stays only a few weeks or months and switch to a new game.
So, it is much more easy to find 2 players playing for 1 year than 1 player playing for 2.
The game has been payed for, and that includes the 'right' to the services for however long I wish.
And its price has been established on the statistical cost of usage. Ask Sony for perpetual right to resale your game without feature loss, and they'll be happy to give you a sell you a more expensive version.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
However the second player may never had bought the game until it was a used game because of the cost of buying the game new. So the original point still stands. I know I never pay $50+ for any game. I wait to buy it from a friend or from a used store. Doing so also means most of the bugs are worked out by the time I get it.
I've of the opinion the only reason game companies introduced online modes to games is so they could better control how and who is playing a game. I remember back in the day having a LAN parties, dialing a friends house or setup my own server to play. I also didn't have to deal with 13 year old prepubescent s screaming obscenities every time I wanted to have a match.
Sony's explanation for the Pass will probably leave you wishing Google Translate supported marketing-speak: "This is an important initiative as it allows us to accelerate our commitment to enhancing premium online services across our first party game portfolio."
Let me do the honors: "Bend over suckers."
First, they look at it differently: each second hand sale is a sale they earn no money from. They consider that a lost sale. This is debatable.
Second, you make the assumption that you payed for unlimited service for an unlimited time. In practice, however you have a limited amount of time you can play games and a limited amount of time you are willing to spend on this particular game. This is calculated into the price of the game. Each second hand gamer increases this particular amount of time per original sale of the game and thus increases service costs.
In the end, a second hand sale is not only a sale that does not bring in money, it actually costs them money.
It's also an incredibly blinkered approach that could well backfire. A lot of people only buy new games because they know they can resell them. A lot of people only buy used because they can't afford new. This scheme might have the desire effect of giving them a slice of all used games, but it might just as likely kill the used game market (because people who can't afford the new game definitely aren't going to want to pay the same price for a used game plus access) and eat into their new game sales (as people become more picky about what they buy in the knowledge there's no resale value since the used market just got gutted). It's a very risky strategy playing with a complex ecology like that, especially when it's one that generally works and this whole thing is just about greed and wanting to sell the same content more than once.
Yet another stab at consumer rights.
Up until about 2010 games were considered sold since they weren't expected to be returned, and as such were subject to the first-sale doctrine. Of course then the US courts go and decide that it's all fine and dandy for EULAs to remove this right. *grumble grumble* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine]
In my day you had a disc, and that was your game. You could play it, lend it to a friend, sell it, turn it into a shuriken (though that was mostly done with AOL cds). I miss that.
To me it seems like they are trying to double dip. If I buy a game, go online and play it for a few months, and then sell it to omeone else and they go onnlie to play, there is no difference in the server cost beyond adding that [lyers tats to the game. I'm simply giving up my reserved slot to someone else.
It's like the Other OS fiasco again. Whe they came out with the PSN, it was free. You have the game, you go online, no fees, you just enjoy it. Now they're saying "Oh actually, now you have to make sure it's a new gamely purchased game or you're out of luck." If they were so worried about the cost of maintaining servers and the like then they should have factored tht in to the cost of the console or the should have made the service into something like Xbox Live. As for the markeing speak, how is decreasing the number of players available forplay enhaning the experience?
Anyone got a light for my sig?
I'm just going to dust off this ball and go play outside.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Hear hear. The whole point of PSN was meant to be that it's free - if developers are now introducing hidden costs to cover the online play features, that's completely missing the point. Besides which, I'd be interested to know what these running costs are - apart from match-making servers, I was under the impression most console games were peer hosted (i.e. one of the players is also the server) specifically to minimise running costs. If it really costs so much to run a server to match player A to players B, C and D, then outsource it to a third party and let them show ads or something - multiplayer has been free forever in the world of the PC and that's still profitable enough that games get made - imposing a hidden tax on every resale is nothing to do with covering costs, it's just about wanting a slice of a market that's nothing to do with them. I'd have less of a problem if the industry were forced to put a big, clear message on the front of every box explaining why it had dminished resale value so at least customers can make an informed choice.
Most games AFAIK the gamers them selves pay for the online services. TF2 or basically any other Valve game are always on dedicated servers (are there official servers that Valve pay for?). BF:BC2 also, MW2 has that fuckup one player has to host. Someone is definitely paying for online services, but its not the makers of the games.
That, that really grinds my gears!
I know such always get critized by customers and it's Sony here... But lets try to look at it objectively. Running online services costs money. Running online services that are constantly improved, have new items or classes or whatever rolled out and the game being balanced all the time cost a lot more money
So, your logic is that it costs SONY more to run servers when someone purchases a game off me and wants to play it online, than when I play it online myself?
Brilliant.
If the original buyer sells the game, he is obviously bored with it. It's not a situation of original buyer playing two years or original buyer playing one year and other player playing one year.
This was the original point. However the second buyer wouldn't have bought the game at all if they had to pay full price. So either way the developer isn't making anymore weather buyer 1 plays for two years or buyer 1 plays for one year and buyer 2 plays for one year.
The comment about single player/lan/multiplayer games in the old times is slightly wrong.
My opinion that I prefer being able to choose who I play with is wrong? I'm so glad you pointed that out for me.
The recent generation multiplayer games have a lot more content and gameplay than they previously had. Unlocks, classes, customization. Even FPS games are getting close to roleplaying/mmo games. I personally love it. The best aspect for example in CoD multiplayer for me has been the customization allowed. I also love that TF2 is adding more and more of it. It's a lot different than from the quake times.
I personally find that being able to add content to the game after release has seriously degraded games. Instead of releasing a full featured great game, publishers are releasing shoddy half games. Then adding the rest of the content that should have been in the original later. Worse still in many cases they're charging you extra for the content you should have gotten when paid $60 up front.
It is possible to argue that resold games do have a longer online lifespan than ones held by a single owner. It's also possible to argue that resold games actually have a considerably shorter first-owner online lifespan and that the quick resale comes from the fact the original owner disliked it. There is some discrepancy here because if you are the original owner of a resold game then you still own the original "license" to play it online but you don't actually have the game anymore so it's value to you is zero. This highlights a difference between online console gaming, MMO gaming and traditional PC online multiplayer gaming.
- Consoles connect to 1st party servers run by the publisher, so the publisher is paying for the bandwidth and server farm to support this online game. Seeing as how bandwidth is cheap and servers can be repurposed for other titles or even run concurrently, I don't see any reason why the bandwidth cost couldn't be absorbed in the original sale price.
- MMO's also use 1st party servers but players can often rack up an awful lot more hours on them and expect continual releases of new content, hence the need for in-game stores, expansion packs, monthly fees, whatever. They also have rather more specialised servers that have less scope for reuse afterwards and tend to require the entire effort of a major publisher, usually meaning there's no side-projects that can slide in alongside it.
- PC multiplayer games used to (and to a wide extent still do) depend on user-hosted servers that cost the original publisher nothing but add huge value to their titles. They still need to run some servers themselves, usually login and stats servers and the like, but as the majority of the cost is being eaten up by the game's users anyway, running an online multiplayer game like this doesn't really cost anything noteworthy.
None of these is really better than any of the others, they all have their upsides and downsides and I'm just looking at the economics here. The problem I would like to highlight is that the price of console gaming with 1st party servers appears to be rising at a much faster rate than the either of the others and that charges for subsequent users of a single copy of a game means that either someone got their pricing really badly wrong or someone is making a cynical move to take a cut from preowned game sales. I wouldn't want to bet either way myself but giving the original owner the non-transferrable right to play a game online is actually a neat way of decreasing the value of a preowned game to the next person and doesn't add any value what-so-ever to the original owner.
If the original buyer sells the game, he is obviously bored with it. It's not a situation of original buyer playing two years or original buyer playing one year and other player playing one year.
But it is neither a simple case of "without used games the developer would have sold twice as many games".
Not only my the person who bought the game used never have bought the game for full price, but the person who bought the game new might not have done so without knowing that he can get some of his money back by selling it to somebody else after a few months.
So used games help the developer (to some degree) by enabling more sales or keeping the price up.
so i'll be sticking with steam then - the games are much cheaper on there anyway
SURELY NOT!!!!!
The other one sadly is either monthly fees or things like this PSN Pass.
I believe you are mistaking PSN Pass with PSN Plus. Plus is the service that extends free PSN with free-to-play titles, discounts and other such junk. Pass appears to be the standard lock-out-the-used-game-buyers methodology used by Electronic Arts.
We screwed the pooch with the original PSN and the PS3 now Microsoft and Nintendo are severely whipping our asses and we can't afford to build out a LIVE competitor for the same fee Microsoft charges so now we will continue with the delusion that people want to buy every game we make at full price forever. (i'm looking at you Games on Demand)
Reducing the resale value reduces the number of first hand sales.
People, who bought the game expecting to get some of the money back might not do so when there is no resale value.
To keep those people the developer would have to set a lower price.
In the end, a second hand sale helps the developer to keep a certain price level, so it earns money.
Seriously, this "omg he's a shill" shit on /. needs to stop.
I'm not anti-open source, in fact I use CentOS and Fedora on my servers every day and I love its scripting abilities. That's where open source software really shines. At the same time I also understand (and acknowledge) that open source software has serious problems on desktop and especially with usability, because that is the truth. Of course we could all just lalalala, but doesn't that do more harm than bringing the fact out?
Pro Facebook? I've just pointed out that normal people like to use it and the fear mongering and "I just don't get it" attitude on slashdot is getting tiresome. For an intelligent community this large the sheer amount of ignorance is sometimes astonishing. I've also noted about the Google+ love and Facebook hate here on slashdot, objectively, as again many people here on slashdot don't seem to be able to see past the google-love mindset and that they both violate privacy and common good. The difference is that Google takes a soft, psychological way to do this and it seems to work for geeks as well extremely well. Like the previously noted "Do you want to improve your browsing and install Chrome" marketing with no "Yes" answer but a soft "Oh I guess that's ok" button.
It's not some shady slashdot marketing, it's opinions that sometimes differ from your own. Learn the difference.
Does this apply to books, too?
Seriously, why do people buy Sony products anymore? I quit when the rootkit scandal broke, and all they have done since is prove that I made a good choice. While every corporation exists to make profit, it should be symbiotic, yet Sony has clearly demonstrated they don't care about their customers, only their profits, by their deeds and their words, many times over.
You can actually get by just fine without Sony products, many of us have for many years. We don't need Playstation (plenty of other choices), we skip buying music on their labels, we have none of their hardware, we don't buy blu-ray. It isn't that hard to go Sony-free. The only "vote" you have in the way Sony treats their customers is with your dollars. Vote for someone else.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Really!??!!
I'm sure what you meant to say was "Selling your hardcopy of game X is akin to selling your DVD copy of film Y"
Saying otherwise is suggesting - like all good *AAs - "we should get paid every time someone experiences our work, regardless of how it is transferred".
That's fine - you can say that if you wish - first, reduce your prices to that of every other "experienced" offering - anywhere between 99c and $10 - thanks.
Anything else and you're double-dipping - why should that be allowed again ? Nope ? Thought as much.
Disclosure: I buy my games - I don't rent them or get them second hand. (I'm also a software developer - so don't try the "you don't understand the process" argument here either).
Surely it's more like selling a movie DVD after you've seen the movie on it, and the person you sold it to demanding to see the movie too?
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
I don't know about your area, but here in Czech Republic old games get progressively cheaper. If you are a cheapskate and can't afford a shiny new game, you probably can't afford the beefy gear required to run the new games either. So you simply play older games on older hardware and you are fine, just say two years behind...
The worked out they could do it with the PC market, so they're moving that test case across to consoles now..
Not only my the person who bought the game used never have bought the game for full price, but the person who bought the game new might not have done so without knowing that he can get some of his money back by selling it to somebody else after a few months.
So used games help the developer (to some degree) by enabling more sales or keeping the price up.
That's certainly the way it works for most car buyers - they buy new and expect to recoup money on the sale or they by second hand. If motor manufacturers fitted a device so that it would be disabled on resale there would be an outcry, and it would probably reduce their sales anyway!
You'd be making a better (but less effective) analogy if you compared it to renting a game.
A movie ticket is a consumable commodity that entitles you to a service, that of watching the movie. It's quite different from purchasing a hard copy of the DVD.
Hard copies enjoy the First Sale doctrine, and as long as the original buyer relinquishes all rights to the property, the next buyer should be entitled to the benefit of his bargain.
I suspect though that your own analogy is inherently weak because the position you are advocating is nothing but bullshit and you can't really defend it.
I would suggest that Sony and other developers base their statistical analysis on game time, etc. on the TRUE lifespan of a sold copy, including used sales, instead of solely on first-sale plays. Then they can come up with a true pricing model based on the very legal practice of the sale of used games, instead of trying to circumvent gamers' rights.
So you're saying it's ok for the company to slack off in what was promised in the later years of a game because the original owners aren't interested anymore?
Boy have I got news for you. I have lots of old games I love replaying. Every time I pick up an old game and play it, I show the same interest in it I had when I first bought it. By your logic after the first couple weeks/months I've owned the game I should have lost interest so the company shouldn't have to support the game anymore because I've already gotten board of it. I couldn't imagine the out rage I'd have if I tried to play Starcraft, Warcraft, Kings Quest, any of the final fantasy games or any of the other games I bought first hand and had a message pop-up. Sorry we're no longer supporting that game better luck next time.
How do you differentiate between and second hand player and a first hand player playing a second time! You can't.
And selling your car used is like stealing cookies from the store. It hurts the guy on the line building a car. you should destroy your car when you are done with it.
Selling your home after living in it hurts carpenters, you really should burn your house down when you move.
Let me guess, inviting friends over to watch a DVD I bought is theft in your eyes. What if I play that movie again? is that also stealing?
I only buy used games and I resell my used games to others because new games are incredibly overpriced. If I am hurting you personally by doing that, than that makes me very very happy. And I will continue to ONLY buy used games from now on. If it makes your industry crumble and puts people like you, that have a horribly distorted sense of reality out of work, then that makes me feel like a hero.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Doing so also means most of the bugs are worked out by the time I get it."
Unless it's any of the crap from Lionhead Studios...
Fable II and Fable III are the most bug ridden turds I have ever seen.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't hate Facebook either nor do I care much about Google plus, but I always get suspicious when someone posts a large and measured first post in the same minute as a new story.
which is totally what she said
"The recent generation multiplayer games have a lot more content and gameplay than they previously had. Unlocks, classes, customization."
and DLC, LOTS of DLC.... over half the game is missing in the box because the gredy Developers want ot charge us $12.00 a pop to unlock things that are actually already in the game.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
when you need more money from consumers, you don't take it from them by lowering the value of your games and basically forcing people to pay more.
you earn it from them by increasing their value.
Do you understand why this is so fucking backwards?
All sony has to do is start pricing games in the $20 range and they'd sell enough to get 3x-5x the profit they get off selling them at the $60 range. This isn't mystery math. Making a game a one-time use, and killing resale value, means the games have less value overall. Less value overall = less people buy.
Don't be absurd. If you buy a DVD, you are purchasing the right to watch the movie AND THE RIGHT TO SELL YOUR COPY. Nobody is going to pay $60 for the right to play some game one time and then have no power to sell it or give it away. It doesn't work that way with reality (bicycles, computers, cars), it doesn't work that way with other forms of art (books, paintings), and there is nothing special about digital media that makes it somehow wrong to sell what is yours. I'm truly sympathetic that artists don't see checks each time their paintings change hands.
WOW, way to be intellectually dishonest with yourself. A movie ticket is for an event. While most people view a DVD as a physical object, its really a license to view, one that can be resold like anything else. But you know this, because you are smart guy. Way to argue for things you know not to be true because it benefits you.
Dear Sony,
,yes, reinstall on a new machine and people just might return for more games.
On paper it might appear as though you are incentivising new game buyers. To me, however, you are calling buyers of used games (aka gamers) second class gamers that don't deserve the benefit of your full content. I'm sorry you lost $3.2 Billion this year, I know that's a LOT of money, but stop trying to milk every penny out of your fans and customers. That's why you've slowly been losing them for the past 10 years.
Do you know what people (and even many pirates) are willing to pay for? Convenience. Make your games easy to buy and play and
Z
Why don't Sony make it possible for people to run their own server? Then there is no issue if Sony doesn't want to keep funding server space for multiplayer. The fans will solve the problem themselves. This is not ideal, since we're talking about a console not a PC. And even in the case of TF2 there needs to be a central server that keeps track of who bought which hats and gained which stats, because if you can run your own server and set your own hats for free, why would anyone shell out money for them? Oh by the way ever tried to sell your steam games? It's just as bad as this crap.
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
To accelerate means to make something faster. This is billed as something to accelerate something for the first-party somehow. Who is the first-party? While it does inhibit other parties, it does not accelerate anything and would seem to inhibit even first parties.
We get it. Game companies seek to block after market activities such as rental and used sales. The success of the new PSPgo proves that their initiave is effective... right? Oh wait, isn't the PSPgo mostly rejected by the masses? I know I haven't seen many PSPgo devices outside of at stores... in fact, I still see more PSPs in public than I have ever seen PSPgos. So has Sony been ignoring the fact that the public generally rejects their "improvements"? Seems so.
In this case, I hope Sony and Sony's customers get what they deserve. At some point, Sony customers have been victims, but with all the crap about Sony these days, anyone who keeps with Sony is no longer a victim, but a willing participant.
So true. I remember when I was young and authors used to write books. Then the used book stores came along and now there are no more books. Will they never learn?
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible -W.B.
So is playing a game twice like seeing a film twice using the same ticket?
Movie tickets are normally sold for a single performance, so it's expected to expire regardless of whoever attends the showing. It's more comparable to someone re-selling a DVD. Developers get their fair share of the profit when the title is originally sold and have no obvious right to take a cut in subsequent re-selling. If you're not making enough profit on the initial sale then rethink your margins and/or business model. It's like turfing someone out of a cafe for denying you a sale by sharing their chips with a friend. You can make sharing against the rules of your cafe, but it's intellectually dishonest to equate it with someone someone stealing chips for resale. By all means introduce terms and technical measures that limit a game to a single activation (I accept that with Steam titles, StarCraft II and WoW. It's completely asinine to equate the reselling of games to piracy for profit. This mentality is one of reasons why I rarely buy movies and games anymore. I'm tired of publishers treating us like shit in order to shore-up a business model that could benefit from a rethink. I'll only buy things that really leap out at me - particularly if I know that I won't be able to re-sell the game should it turn out to be less than enjoyable.
Unless most or all of this PSN pass payment goes onto the devs then this system is worse than pre owned. It's the devs that need the income to keep making games not sony.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Want to kill used market? Stop selling your stuff as if customers were made of gold, and stop with the "Keep that up, and soon nobody will create anything anymore" fear-mongering crap: the entertainment industry has been using this line with "piracy" for decades and nobody gives a fuck. My 2 cents.
If the disk is mine, I can resell it as I want. It's like a book, and don't tell me that reselling books is bad. Once I sell the book, movie or game, I can't see/play it again. So, what's the problem?
And game creators do win with second hand sales. Because many people won't buy so many games if they couldn't resell them later and recover part of their money.
Don't mix game creators with game distributors into the same bag.
In that regard, only the first sale pays.
I suspect that you lack basic knowledge of how the market works. Game developers most of the time get very very limited premium from well selling game - most if not all profits stay with the publishers.
What you say applies better to the self-published indie games - "Game authors get nothing" - but not to the majority of games distributed by big publishers where game authors were already paid in advance for creation of the game.
Keep that up, and soon nobody will create anything anymore. Why feed the leeches? Can't you see that?
Nonsense.
You probably never being around creative people. People create not because of profits - primary goal is to express themselves, to be heard, to be seen. Desire for profit comes much much later.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
The problem here is that smart phones I think are killing the game vendors. Sure there are die hard gamers, but that market I would say is saturated. Those who became gamers became, and those who don't game don't. It's a binary thing. Though smart phones on the other hand are attracting a whole lot of people who might have played games and bought one or two games.
I am thinking of the Super Mario or sonic the hedge hog type gamers. Not the halo palyers here. With these restrictions all they will do is demolish their own businesses. It reminds me of the music, books, movie business when the realized that their business models changed. The first reaction and oh so predictable is to restrict! But like music, books, and movies restrictions does not get you very far. In fact it is just makes it that much harder...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
In fact, yes, I think that is as bad. You can't unsee the movie can you? You don't pay for the DVD disk, you pay to see the movie. In case of DVD, as many times as you like.
Bzzt, wrong! When you buy a DVD you are paying to have a licensed copy of that DVD. You can watch it as many times as you like, you can watch it with other people, as many times as you like, you can watch it with different groups of people as many times as you like, you can lend it to other people as many times as you like. It is just like a book. I do not believe that the second hand book market stopped new books being published and neither will a second hand games market stop new games being created.
An experience is not a saleable commodity. You sell a licensed copy of the game. You do not sell the experience of playing that game.
Open source is bad on the desktop? I take it you have never used compiz, which is better than MS's window manger? Or perhaps KDE, which is stable and feature rich while not forcing users to spend hours setting things up? How about Firefox or chromium, the 2 most popular web browsers?
I've translated the marketing speak into layman's terms, but I don't understand something:
How does preventing second-hand purchase people from using online components allow SONY to more quickly make the online experience/contents better for the people who initially bought the game?
It's not like the tech people maintaining and unclogging the tubes actually work on creating the contents...
~Syberz
Ha, I new my MBA would come in handy. This has two main points:
"This is an important initiative ...
Point 1:
"We think this will make more money for our shareholders and executive's bonuses ..."
"...as it allows us to accelerate our commitment to enhancing premium online services across our first party game portfolio."
Point 2:
"...We can also make the resale market less lucrative since you won't get a full game experience so a used game is worth less. We can then sell you a pass to unlock those features, which gets us back to Point 1."
Left unsaid was:
"If we can drive some of the used game dealers out of business that's just a bit of lagniappe."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
No your movie ticket gives you entrance to one performance; you are basically renting that performance.
There is a difference between buying a film and renting a film - likewise there historically has been a difference between buying a game and renting a game.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Or cars?
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
At this point people who haven't learned and are still purchasing Sony products and are still giving Sony their heard earned dollars truly deserve the shafting that Sony delivers. Sony is a company that has become downright hostile to consumer rights and to their customers. Their arrogance even in the face of the PSN being down and all the hacks is simply breathtaking.
By the time I'm ready to buy a second hand game I would also know this. For example I didn't run out and buy Dragon Age. As a result I know how buggy it is and will probably just borrow it from my sister if I ever decide I do want to play it. I believe this is a prime example of how the publishers are putting out crappy games on hype and selling them for a mint. Then thinking they'll just fix any issues later instead of fixing them in the first place.
"You don't pay for the DVD disk, you pay to see the movie"
Die. That's the kind of "Licensing" bullshit that the media business have been trying to force on us for years. If I buy a DVD, I buy a DVD. If you're saying I'm licensing the right to see the movie then I demand the licensing company send me a replacement DVD every time my copy gets a scratch.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
First, they look at it differently: each second hand sale is a sale they earn no money from. They consider that a lost sale. This is debatable.
Actually, I'd consider that an excellent example of a lost sale-- a second-hand sale involves a buyer who was perfectly willing to spend money for the product who didn't pay through the standard supply chain. (At least not directly; the original customer did.) What matters is the price here-- if they were willing to pay $U used, they would've paid $U new too. Worse yet, they may have been willing to pay $N new, but since there was a nearly identical version for $U, why pay that premium? (Personally, I like the shiny extras and cheerfully pay more for them, but a lot of people aren't like that.)
Sony is like a grape, they need to get stomped until they wine. Hackers have at them, keep beating on this nuisance.
Hope is the currency of fools
The media companies have been waging war against the consumer for over a century.
- "Copy Protection" - so that consumers can't even safeguard their own purchase. If I want to make a separate copy of a purchased video/game and keep the original in a safe place (someplace where, say, inquisitive dogs and 3-year-olds can't get to it), that should be my right.
- Shrink-wrap licenses. Remember when Adobe tried to sue a company that resold its products, claiming the terms of the (unopened) shrinkwrap license included an agreement not to resell?
And if you want to go WAY back: remember, the book publishers tried to stop the creation of the US's public lending library system. Now, with the terms on eBooks, they're trying to pull the same crap and make it impossible for libraries to still serve their customers.
Aside from a few hits, I don't think the PC market has had much success with that. Sure, they've reduced used game sales but they've also reduced overall sales and had to drop prices. Now all the money is in things like Farmville where the new/used issue is a nonfactor.
I think your parent poster got it right that there is considerable risk in doing this to console games. There is a chunk of used gamers who will start to buy SOME new games once used games is no longer an option. But there is another chunk of used gamers (in my opinion a much larger chunk) who will stop buying console games altogether once used games are not an option...at least until the prices of new games drops significantly. Finally, there is a another chunk of gamers that buy new and sell used that will reduce the games they buy once selling games is no longer an option. It is not clear but wouldn't surprise me if the reduction from these gamers is greater than the increase in new game sales from previously used gamers.
If the PC market is any indication, this blocking of resales may simply result in console games dropping in price from $50-60 to $30-50 and a bit of a drop in sales overall.
Personally, I buy almost exclusively used games. The exceptions are the games that I know aren't going to drop much in price on the used market anyway. A high rated Mario/Donkey Kong game? The used prices are going to be so close to new prices for years, I might as well just buy new. Nintendo has found the best way to reduce used game sales. Create quality games with a lot of replay value.
If the used game market suddenly disappeared tomorrow, I'd probably reduce my game buying to the occasional Mario type game on birthdays/christmas along with an occasional game that got raved about via word of mouth.from personal friends I trust. I simply don't have the money to buy all my used games at new game prices.
I think if the car industry tried to do something similar in blocking resales of new cars, there'd be a lot of used car buyers that simply decide to get a motorcycle or use public transportation rather than pay $20,000+ for a new car that they could never sell.
I remember a time when games where made to be fun in single player mode. Some of them had a multiplayer mode that didn't requre internet access. I like that sort of games and that is the kind of games I will buy.
Me too. I put my PS3 online and yanked the network cable out half way through reading the license agreement.
I couldn't agree to it.
So why do new release movies on DVD cost more than a deluxe cinema ticket? I would expect your "single experience" DVD to cost pennies compared to the costs of running a whole movie theatre.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
And they wonder why people pirate games...who the hell is going to pay money for something they don't even own? Ridiculous...
Used game shops make money on each sale. But they didn't make the game. Game authors get nothing. That is why it's bad. Keep that up, and soon nobody will create anything anymore.
Heh. I just have this image in my head of an insanely popular game only selling 1,000 copies, and lots and lots of people spend years patiently waiting for one of those copies to become available at a used game store.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
people will trade and use used games fully unlocked.
Read radical news here
I love the "nobody will create anything anymore" argument.
There are many people out there that have the drive to create regardless of compensation, be it literature, music, artwork, movies, games, applications. There are thousands upon thousands of free alternatives to pretty much anything out there. There are even scores and scores of free to play MMO's out there now, and that's something people never saw as being a truly viable option for a mainstream game.
Big Content really needs to understand that they don't hold a monopoly on entertainment anymore, and now that so many people have broadband and reasonably good bandwidth, we don't need their mode of delivery necessarily, either. They need to understands this, but they won't, because their business model is built upon antiquated ideas and the arrogance of "just throw whatever we want at consumers and they'll have to buy it because there's no other option". 10 years ago maybe, but today, they're sorely mistaken.
A movie ticket is a pass to a 1 time event, 60+ dollars for a physical product is a bit different, and fuck you for telling me what I can and cant do with my own god dammed property
suck my ass mr tator, or should I call you dic
That was a big seller...
Really, all Sony has to do is to make the entire console turn into dust after one play. Considering the quality of consumer hardware these days, it shouldn't be too difficult for them. Much of it barely works when new.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
With this attitude, you will be back to watching TV soon, hero. There will be nothing to play :)
Wanna bet?
Yes. It's called a "Director of Marketing."
That kind of text tends to happen when there are meetings between marketing and legal (what an unholy union that must be).
No sir, people pay for products and services, not "experiences" (not for a movie, not for a game)
When people go to the theater, they're paying for a service: the service of a seat in a room with a screen for a certain time, during which happens to be running a movie. While in the theater, people could completely ignore the movie that's showing and not "experience" it at all during the time (fall asleep, make out with boy/girlfriend, focus on chowing down on the popcorn, etc)
When people buy a DVD, they're buying the actual product: the disk, which happens to have the movie on it. People could actually never fire that DVD up and never "experience" the movie.
No sir, game makers do not sell "the experience of the game", even if they think they are. They sell an arrangement of 0's and 1's (which happen to, if interpreted by the right computer, lead to a game). Of course, they think part of selling this pattern includes the "right" to decide who gets to duplicate or use this pattern.
This "right" however is ridiculous to enforce, as you admitted yourself: you can't unsee a movie, or a game. The idea (of the resulting game/movie) is duplicated the moment it is "experienced", and cannot be undone (short of wiping people's memories...). Furthermore, having an idea duplicated does not mean the maker (you) is now one idea short. See, if somebody buys or steals a physical DVD disk, the disk maker is now short one disk. If somebody buys a seat in a movie theater (service), that's one less seat the theater has to sell to others
But with "experiences", or ideas, having one more person know about it doesn't mean you now have one "less" idea.
Thus, "first sale" cannot be reasonably applied to ideas like it would with goods and services. That is one of the flaws of current IP laws: it's trying to treat ideas like goods and services, and trying to control the spread of ideas like controlling the spread of goods and services.
Don't get me wrong: content makers should be compensated somehow. IP laws came from good intentions, but it is working off on flawed principals, and not keeping up with the changing times (to say the least)
And please drop the fear mongering and doomsaying about how eventually nobody would make content. One doesn't have to look far to see how that's not the case: music and mp3s
For all the music piracy that goes on (and it went on even before mp3s, in the form of cassettes and tapes), the music industry is still around. In fact, the smart ones, instead of clinging to old outdated IP laws, embraced the new technology, and adapted to new business models.
Whether Sony's move is a cling to dated laws or a smart adaptation will depend on the actual execution and implementation. Without more details, more cautious people (and your usual Sony-hating crowd) would of course think it's the former.
Or cars? How DARE you sell a car after you've sat in it!
It's also an incredibly blinkered approach that could well backfire.
EA's actually been doing this exact thing for a while now (called "Project $10"). It hasn't backfired on them. I think Sony let EA take the "might backfire" plunge 2 years ago and watched how it played out. EA didn't seem damaged by it, so Sony is adopting it for their first party games now. And, of course, games have no say short of just not buying a game. Unfortunately, I have no faith that gamers will ever vote with their wallets (as was proven by the paid DLC push/uproar years and years back).
I do have to say that EA did the "Project $10" thing right once. There is no multiplayer on "Alice: Madness Returns." Instead of punishing used game purchasers (via crippling the game), the rewarded new game purchasers by giving the a free copy of the original "American McGee's Alice."
I remember a time when games where made to be fun in single player mode. Some of them had a multiplayer mode that didn't requre internet access.
I know, I miss single player games, too. Especially single player first person shooters. What does the average nonRPG clock in at nowadays, 6 hours of single player gameplay? Maybe 10 at the most?
I'm betting in a few years single player modes are going to be nothing but the multiplayer with bots, like Brink. I'm tired of it, after playing through Modern Warfare 2 in two sittings, I vowed to never buy another game with less than 10 hours of single player gameplay. It's just not worth it to me. Better to "borrow it" on the pirate bay, honestly, because once you've been teabagged by a 12 year old yelling racial slurs into the microphone in one shooter's multiplayer, you've pretty much experienced all of them.
LMAO!!! Thanks for the great laugh now I have to clean the coffee of my second monitor.
There are people out there right now developing games for free because they love doing it. There are also very cheap highly entertaining games, Minecraft is one of my favorites at the moment. I've convinced both my sisters, my brother and their significant others to play as well and for the price the entertainment can't be beet. There will always been things to play and if your industry was doing things right you'd have good profit without having to put God knows how much into DRM schemes and treating your customers like thieves.
While I don't agree with this at all, I don't think the parent post merits a troll mod either.
Maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture here, but what difference does it make, from the perspective of the game publisher, whether I play the game for 2 years, using the services provided, or I play the game for 1 year and someone else plays the game for another extra year?
It makes a difference because in their eyes they equate anyone experiencing the content without getting it directly from them as a lost sale, while at the same time being willfully ignorant of the fact that stuff like this does more to inhibit sales of a game than piracy or used sales EVER did.
This lowers the resale value, making consumers less likely to buy that game. If it is employed on all future PS3 games then this will make the console less attractive. Sony obviously think that they generate more money by encouraging 2nd hand buyers to buy first hand than they get by charging a premium to early adopters.
[Intentionally left blank]
The library eBook thing sort of makes sense to me: a digital copy can be reproduced almost infinitely for almost no cost. Everyone could rent a book from a digital library for free. I for one would welcome this future of free reading material.
SSC
I think the issue really is they just realized they weren't getting anywhere with their battle against piracy. All they're doing is causing headaches for people who legitimately buy the game, which in turn is turning them to piracy. Now game companies are shifting focus. Soon they'll find that's going to cost them even more. What do you think someone waking into a store and only seeing games for $60 is going to do when they only have $40 for a game? I imagine they'll run home and download it instead of buying it.
There is certain trend in the media industry to move away from products to per licensed use. This is an absolute assult on capitalist principals which generates wealth through property. Instead of selling products that may gain value over time (I by old pc games as collector items) and allowing new markets to grow (gamestop resell,emulators) these unscrupulous corporations want to charge each individual use of a product over your entire lifetime! It is hypocritical for these corporations to lobby for intelectual property protection when they don't even want to generate property.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
They also drop the price to 1/3 (or less) of what they used to be charging. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend $60+ on a game only to be stuck with it when I don't want it any more.
Sony really IS a glutton for punishment, isn't it?
After the long and infamous string of bad behaviors, poor choices, generally crappy and negative actions towards it's customers, along with the numerous PR foot-gun bullseyes that Sony has inflicted upon itself over the last 10 years or so, it simply amazes me that a supposedly sophisticated, modern, tech/media multinational giant with whole divisions of people supposedly advising them on PR & policy issues like Sony, could be so seemingly-determined to reach out to every last human being on Earth...and make them despise Sony.
The saddest part is that Sony is far from alone, just the one presently in the spotlight.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Dude, this is MONEY we're talking here. Sony doesn't give a shit if they're being fair. They don't give a shit about reasoning. If you're selling someone a used game, that's a customer lost who MAY have otherwise bought the game new. They see that as money out of their pocket.
And it's not just Sony. The same applies to just about every game publisher out there. Why do you think the PC game publishers were so happy to kill off the used market for PC games? They WILL move to do the same for console games. It's only a matter of time.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Bad analogies are like artichokes flying to the moon.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Good luck finding a pickup group outside. Media hysteria about sexual abuse of children by strangers has created paranoia in parents' minds.
I mean, you expect this kind of behavior out of others...but Sony has such a long history of consumer-friendly practices.
Wow, maintaining that level of sarcasm made even me dizzy.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Because they are one of the only 3 decent gaming consoles (2 if you only care about HD)
There are three consoles and one device that is not a console but can be used like one: Wii, Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3, and Wintendo (a compact gaming PC running Windows Home Premium). Drop Sony and drop SDTV and you still have two different Microsoft choices.
And then they will cry piracy.
If people don't buy a Sony console, how can Sony claim mass copyright infringement of games that only run on a Sony console?
I'm in agreement with you.
If you look it up you'll see after killing the second hand market for PC games the sale of PC games in general dropped off and piracy became a much larger issue on the platform. Of course standard correlation/causation statement applies.
I guess the other plus side to killing the second hand market is that if consoles follow the same trend as PC games we'll see the prices drop too. I think killing the second hand market is a very stupid move on the publishers part because, as others have stated, not being able to re-sell a game decreases it's value. Overall that means less profit for the publishers. At which point they'll turn around and blame piracy again.
Why can't we vote with regulation?
Because of MPAA control over TV news. The major TV news outlets in the United States are all owned by movie studios, and candidates for the U.S. Congress won't take positions against major movie studios during an election campaign for fear of TV news branding such candidates as irrelevant.
random monthly fees (like the bogus "tax-recovery" fee they still charge)
If regulators were to impose unfunded mandates on you, how would you recover the cost of implementing these mandates?
Not to mention that for a few thousand years artists created plenty while only getting paid once (if at all) for their work instead of being paid millions of times for doing one item of work.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
And this is the exact same issue when dealing with just about any store that specializes in used goods regardess if it's games, books, CDs, DVDs/blueray, etc.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
create a different user for each game you buy, give the user with the game when you sell
I don't think so. They still are supporting one copy of the game. One game, one potential person utilizing online services. That doesn't change when the game is resold; it's just a different person going online.
They hope that nobody will be using the online services of the game a year after the initial purchase, but that's not something they're necessarily entitled to enforce.
the net effect will be to convince people they really ought to try to xbox
and what makes you think Microsoft won't adopt this model too?
face it, we're moving to an economy where we rent everything... rent music through monthly subs, rent games through one-time activation keys, rent computer software through one-time-activation keys, rent mobile phones through monthly service charges which subsidise the handset...
the lawyers would argue that, effectively, we already did, we simply paid a one-off licensing fee to rent the item indefinitely and never owned the item only the physical "container".
The quality of the car and other products goes down after use. The bits that make up the video game do not degrade over time.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
To clarify, I'm not suggesting you shouldn't sell your used games. Just saying it's different than your used car or whatever.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
We now do self distribution, Steam [...]
And why the hell then you complain about S/H games? which do not exist in digital distribution?
The problem with passcodes, RTFA, that it renders the whole market of S/H console games of disks defunct. Which is rather vital as the largest demographics - teens - simply do not have money to buy new games as often as they are released. Unless the price isn't offset by sale of old games.
[...] and have some localized deals with publishers in some areas. Much bigger share of profit gets to us now. Seems to work, so far...
I wonder how much games you sell downloads vs. disks? If it works for you, I expect that digital downloads to dominate.
P.S. Bigger problem would be that game developers need to learn to be nicer to their customers. "Take care of your customers and business would take care of itself." But there is this tradition, especially in console markets, where they sell games like bottled water: buy it for what it is, even though probably we make it in commercials appear more than what it actually is, and removed few common sense feature everybody was taking for granted.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
First, it's not debatable that a "second hand sale is a lost sale". People who buy second hand can't / won't pay $60+ for a game (hence why they're buying used - did you think it was because they just wanted the scratches on the disk and missing instruction manual?) If they want to increase sales to the people who buy used games, they need to lower prices. It's not like they aren't making billions and billions of dollars already.
Second, if you buy a game that has a single-player mode, you ARE paying for unlimited game-play from now until your copy of the game / your system stops working. Online games, you're right, you are paying for a limited amount of server time. However, decent companies realize that servers don't cost THAT much and keep them up for a very long time (Diablo, Diablo II, and Starcraft come to mine - all up for more than a decade). Decent companies realize that there's a reason to provide a good experience for your customer and they can also make a profit off those older games still as a result.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I hate DRM as much as the next guy, I love the first-sale doctrine, and I'm saying this as a free culture junkie: this is perfectly fine.
All this does is limit ONLINE access for CERTAIN games (so mainly offline games won't be affected) to the original purchaser. If you buy used, you have to buy a license to play online. This is how it has been done for YEARS on PCs and nobody over there seems to have a problem with it. Heck, the games themselves are relatively DRM-free (just back up the ISO and you're good), and they can't provide online gaming for free you know. Every little cent helps the service be better than otherwise and I, as a gamer, appreciate that.
This increases the incentive to purchase new, while still allowing you to purchase used if you always have been. This is NOT limiting the ability of the games to be sold used; you can still buy them used and they will work just fine. You will just have to support the network developers with a contribution if you do; isn't that fair? You don't have the right to play online in any game you want for free. You do have the rights to resell and backup games though, and that isn't being tampered with whatsoever.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Also we don't have any games now. Because used games have been available longer than the "coder" above has been alive. I remember buying Atart 2600 carts used as a kid.
Yup the video game industry is doomed because of used sales... I wonder if this guy has more fairy tales.
I blame the lack of good games on the no talent hacks working at Game development companies.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And each book cost tens of millions to create as well, right?
http://2dboy.com/games.php
these guys have made more money by being HONEST than your company has ever hoped to make.
That's the problem, Game makers prefer to be dishonest and criminal instead of honest. If your game sells for more than $25.00. You are dishonest.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> I'm truly sympathetic that artists don't see checks each time their paintings change hands.
Actually, that is an almost universal practice in Europe, and has been adopted in California.
What happens in actuality, is that the surcharge on the sale price, which is supposed to go to the artist, usually is collected by a collection agency which takes a big cut out of it... assuming they even know how to contact the artist. Almost as bad as ASCAP....
@cgeys: Well I wouldn't go as far to call you a "Troll" but there is a gaping flaw in your argument. That "copy" of the game has already been "paid for" at one point so Sony has been compensated in that sense. What does it matter "who" is currently using the game? It's not like multiple people can play online with the same game disc thereby increasing costs for Sony. For some reason, certain companies seem to feel entitled to receive money every time their games exchanges hands. The ONLY way I can see them actually losing anything (or at least the "opportunity" to make money) is if someone chooses to buy something "used" instead of new so their funds go to the retailer and the game company gets nothing. That still doesn't affect the number of people playing online though.
At first this made my eyebrow twitch, but honestly as long as it only applies to the games online I really don’t see an issue with needing a key to associate it with your account. (Unless they pull that UBISOFT nonsense where you can’t play your single player game without online activation) I think the bigger issue here is how much they charge for their awful games. Slapping you in the face and chaining it down after that initial transaction seems pretty minor in comparison. In short - Make better games, people wont trade them back in later.
So the discs don't get scratched? Manuals don't get lost? Cover art don't get screwed up? Wow good to know. Oh wait, that's right...bullshit.
Lets be honest folks, if they want to do that for someone online service they are paying for? no problem there though I would argue a well designed game shouldn't need a corp to run the server in the first place, but okay, still roll with it. But when you kill the single player through your DRM BS just to force another sale? Yeah please go fuck yourself Mr Game dev.
Off the top of my head games I still have installed and play on my Win 7 HP gamer PC at home...No One Lives Forever I&II, Freelancer, Freespace, hell after seeing the shitastic Duke Nukem Forever I even dug out my old Duke Nukem Atomic edition to enjoy some good Duke.
So if you want to charge for your online service? Go right ahead, servers cost money and we understand (even if that shows your design sucks) even if it isn't the best situation for the customer. But killing single player is like setting a self destruct on books to make sure nobody can check them out at the library. companies go out of business, tits do go up on occasion.
I would also add if they are gonna do this BS then games should have expiration dates no different than milk, since it is gonna go bad and I don't want to have to research just to buy a game without getting screwed.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And each book cost tens of millions to create as well, right?
Then consider the movie industry. I remember when I was young and the VCR and movie rentals were going to destroy the industry. Somehow they seemed to survive.
if they were willing to pay $U used, they would've paid $U new too.
This is just an assumption. They could be boycotting the company that made the game (and thus do not wish to give them money but still want to play the game). Damn that potential loss of potential profit!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Seriously, this "omg he's a shill" shit on /. needs to stop.
Everyone that disagrees with me is obviously a shill.
At the same time I also understand (and acknowledge) that open source software has serious problems on desktop and especially with usability, because that is the truth.
That would depend on who you ask, would it not?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That potential loss of potential profit is absolutely crippling for game companies. Soon we won't have any games at all!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That's right car buyers! Keep 'degrading' those cars by driving them around for a year and then selling the rotten used-up husks that are left over for $10k-$20k less than you paid for them! I'll gladly take that scrap off your hands!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It hurts the game developers by denying them a fair share of profit. It's the same as for-profit piracy. Disclosure: I work for a game development company.
Well here you have it folks, straight from the horse's mouth. Used game sales are as bad as for-profit piracy. Game developers, unlike other software developers, are entitled to be paid whenever their software is used. Otherwise it's THEFT!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You are insane with rent-seeking greed. It might be because you're underpaid and overworked, a lot of game developers are, that's why I didn't go into the industry. You should get out of it as soon as you can.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That's OK, we don't need the junk the big game companies are squeezing out these days anyway. Like Hollywood they've become afraid to do anything different, staggering development costs have made the stakes too high to take any risks. They make things that are fairly enjoyable but horribly overpriced, and then on those awful consoles they nickle-and-dime you to death with DLC and turn the online world into a shitty-graphics version of the IRL rat race by offering items that give players an advantage for money. And then there's the motion-control gimmick.
It's not fun anymore.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Bingo! The word 'copyright' has been twisted to favor the publishing company, when in reality, it's supposed to outline a set of rights consumers have with copies of works they purchase. If anything, the publishing companies (RIAA, MPAA, and now many in the video games industry) are the ones who have been violating copyright laws.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Wait, so I can't charge someone the cost of a recliner every time they experience reclining in it?
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
The reason you usually pay more for a DVD than you do a ticket at the theatre is the fact that you can reuse the DVD as a durable medium.
Much the same reason if you buy a recliner instead of rent it you pay more as a capital investment, but don't have to pay over time.
The exceptions are the games that I know aren't going to drop much in price on the used market anyway. A high rated Mario/Donkey Kong game? The used prices are going to be so close to new prices for years, I might as well just buy new. Nintendo has found the best way to reduce used game sales. Create quality games with a lot of replay value.
This is simply incorrect on the face of it. Released in 2007, Super Mario Galaxy goes for around $20 on Ebay. The sequel, SMG2, goes for around $30 used, being about a year old. This is a 40% discount. Both games were very highly rated.
This action by Sony shows an utter disrespect towards its customers, right when some of them might have been starting to forget the PSN fiasco. It's sad for me to say this, because I think that Sony's consoles are always above their competition. Unfortunately, I can't accept to pay a higher price to support a company which will treat me like a cash cow once they've locked me in.
Oh well, perhaps I'm too grown up for games anyway.
Because clearly there are very few of them here, because the term "nerd" assumes you have a few good brain cells.
Anyone who thinks Sony will "go out of business" over this, or any other issue they've had of late, lacks even one.
As much as I'd LOVE to see it, it won't happen, despite the fact that people have told me over and over since the root kit issue it would.
I see the "Sony is falling!" people on the same level that I saw the "The world is ending in May!" morons.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
This is the worst case of moderator bias I have yet seen on Slashdot. (And I've been reading Slashdot for a long time.)
You may disagree with what the parent says, but it is a very reasonable post.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Also, if I understand correctly, this is for the Online MP aspect of the games, NOT for the SP games themselves. If so, I can kinda-sorta understand their reasoning in that, the Game Devs and Publishers are willing to support Online Play for people who have paid THEM (Publishers and by extension, Developers) for the game, and that they will NOT support Online Play for people who have NOT paid them for the game. In my opinion, that perspective seems reasonable, if a bit extreme.
EA's actually been doing this exact thing for a while now (called "Project $10"). It hasn't backfired on them.
That'll be why their revenue has been dropping since 2009, right?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Are you saying the games industry and the movie industry are similar? Because from what I understand, both of them don't work the same way.
They both sell copyrightable products that take millions of dollars to make. You can rent both, and you can sell used copies of both. It was initially claimed that rentals would destroy the industry, as "hlavac" was claiming "Keep that up, and soon nobody will create anything anymore." with regards to used games.
Your complaint to the previous poster was that books don't cost tens of millions to make. Now you are complaining because... well I don't know, you didn't say exactly what difference ruins the analogy.
Also, if I understand correctly, this is for the Online MP aspect of the games
The comments in this sub-thread were in response to hlavac's outrageous claim about used games being immoral in general and killing the industry.
I see arguments like those all the time and while they might be right, they might as well be wrong.
Yes, killing the used game market sale means some people would happily buy the game won' at first. But being left out feels like shit and some would buy it anyway.
Yes, killing the used game market means that some people who would happily buy the game used won't but some people that really want that game would painfully bite the bullet and buy new anyway.
So killing the used game market might or might not negatively affect the bottom line. It is an open question that calls for professionally conducted analysis. Given that Sony probably spends more on marketing than in actually making good games. It's very probable that they have figured out that subverting the law, voiding the first sale doctrine, trampling over peoples rights, pissing everybody and being general ass-holes all around might just be the most lucrative option.
So I don't think it is so much a problem of them not being market smart as much as it's a problem of them being greedy pigs.
A solution should would be to make a player's guild or union of sorts. Just like entities like the MPAA unabashedly exists solely to promote the interest of international media conglomerates.
But... the future refused to change.
Actually, the argument is that the average user might play online for six months, using maybe 200 hours of server time. That server cost is accounted for in the original purchase price of the game. Now that user gets tired, and sells the game to someone else, who now plays for another four months and 150 hours of server time. Since the new user hasn't paid any additional, that skews the average server usage per copy up, cutting into the publisher's margins. It's a perfectly valid argument that they would claim requires a rise in initial sales cost to make up the difference.
Now the perfectly valid counterpoint to that is that the publisher should not be running game servers in the first place. If the game is good, a community will form around it and provide the servers. As long as there are users that want to play the game, there will be servers available to play on. Valve has used that model for fifteen years now, and iD used it before them (yes I realize Valve games are now locked to a Steam account and non-transferable). Releasing a dedicated server open to the public would negate any of that extra cost incurred by resold games. Of course, if they don't control the game servers, they can't force the game into obsolescence, and force purchase of the sequel.
This sort of behavior accelerates the development of open source hardware and software for game-play. I am sick to death of this concept that software is not sold, but rather licensed. As a software engineer, I am sick of people pirating my software and re-selling it behind my back, and keeping the money for themselves. I sold one copy of an OS to someone who later proudly told me, "All my customers LOVE your software". The advent of the "game console" and the cartridge were a natural way to cut down on piracy, and you could sell your stuff if you became bored with it. That worked for me. Then the Other OS debacle... I bought two original PS3's and felt I had gotten a good deal because when I was done paying games, I could learn about the CELL processor programming in Linux. The advent of the Internet as a delivery system for updates and the delivery medium for the shared game experience started out well enough but started downhill when you got to the point where they wanted to have a valid credit card on file for you all the time while you were a "network member". Then they played takeaway with the Other OS option, and enforced it by making the owners choose to keep their original firmware (and the Other OS option) at the cost of not having access to their network. That was really nasty, as either way you choose, you lost something in the process. I decided that having spent over a thousand dollars acquiring my two units, I would forgo the software updates and the PSN. And to this day I still have the two lovely units, although one of them quit playing blue media for some DRM related reason and I dare not get it fixed because the first thing they do is upgrade your firmware, so another form of takeaway is the loss of my movie player. Now I am so pissed at Sony, I don't even want to fool around with the CELL processor any more and the two units sit here as a testimony to my childish wasting of money I could have donated to some village so they could buy chickens and goats. The only good thing is that I only bought four movies, and four games. When I discovered Sony wanted forty dollars for a movie, that stopped any interest I had in collecting blueray movies. I hated every game I bought, and the only part of the equation that I did get excited about which was their SL-like social network, was several years late and I lost interest in that as well. Too many broken promises... The nausea factor just got too high. Now I am mad at myself for ever having transferred my respect for their products into some kind of feeling that I liked the company, because that was misplaced. Now I just plain hate sony, and I hate Microsoft, and I dislike HP. I guess I have just become a stodgy old guy.
...yet another reason I have ZERO interest in purchasing a Sony product... and honestly, losing interest in having much of ANYTHING to do with consoles, other than what the industry deems antiques, like XBox, etc. Now, that being said, I MAY get interested in buying say an original PS1, or one of the huge PS2s, since Sony has no use for them, and you don't need to be online at all for you to get the "experience" you were paying for.
Stone
whether I play the game for 2 years, using the services provided, or I play the game for 1 year and someone else plays the game for another extra year?
You wouldn't play the game for two years, but maybe just for a month or two (or at least the average gamer would), then sell it. Thus the publishers would have to pay your server costs and the server costs for the person who you sold it to and then whoever they sold it to when they got bored with it. Thus in the end the server cost multiply due to used sales, while they income from used sales stays zero.
The game has been payed for, and that includes the 'right' to the services for however long I wish
No it doesn't. You buy no right, the publisher is just nice enough to let you play online however long he likes and if he things players had enough he will pull the plug or start with online pass stuff to get his share of the used game sales pot.
and what makes you think Microsoft won't adopt this model too?
They are already doing it. To play online, even when the game is new, on Xbox360 you have to pay them $5 a month, while multiplayer on PS3 is free or whatever the cost of the PSN pass is per game when bought used with a used code.
In contrast to a deliberate attack on game buyers, it sounds more like Sony's trying to separate the game itself (which can be played offline in most cases) from the service it connects to in order to use online capabilities. The first buyer gets a free pass to use the online service (bundled into the money Sony gets off it). Any subsequent buyers have to buy online access (since Sony doesn't get money off that sale). The long-term practicality, business-wise, for Sony is questionable in my opinion, but I can't really see moral issues with it.
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
At least with steam you'll never have to worry about lost, scratched or stolen disks.