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Anger With Game Content Lock Spurs Reaction From Studio Head Curt Shilling
MojoKid writes "Studios and publishers are fighting back hard against the used game market, with the upcoming title Kingdoms of Amular the latest to declare it will use a content lock. In this case, KoA ups the ante by locking out part of the game that's normally available in single-player mode. Gamers exploded, with many angry that game content that had shipped on the physical disc was locked away and missing, as well as being angry at the fact that content was withheld from used game players. One forum thread asking if the studio fought back against allowing EA to lock the content went on for 49 pages before Curt Shilling, the head of 38 Studios, took to the forums himself. His commentary on the situation is blunt and to the point. 'This is not 38 trying to take more of your money, or EA in this case, this is us rewarding people for helping us! If you disagree due to methodology, ok, but that is our intent... companies are still trying to figure out how to receive dollars spent on games they make, when they are bought. Is that wrong? if so please tell me how.'"
Is that wrong? if so please tell me how
There's nothing wrong with wanting to make a profit. There's everything wrong about withholding product and lying about it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They are preventing someone from having anything of value to sell after they are done with it. Perhaps if the game didn't cost so much in the first place it would have less value used and more would buy it new - what a concept. I don't buy too many games these days but I play many older ones and some online games. It's stunts like this that would prevent me from buying this game new OR used. $50 and $60 dollars per game is crazy and has greatly curtailed my desire to buy. Between crappy DRM that makes my life hell and is now starting to limit even hardware changes to publishers pulling crap like this to ensure I cannot resell any game I buy I simply have no stomach to purchase their crap. Let them go bankrupt and someone who values their customers more take their place so far as I'm concerned....
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companies are still trying to figure out how to receive dollars spent on games they make, when they are bought. Is that wrong? if so please tell me how.
In my case they need to figure out a better way to receive my dollars. There's absolutely nothing wrong with what they are doing. It simply means that I will refuse to support their business by purchasing their products. If enough people feel the same way, then they will either find a way to stop treating people like shit and make money or go out of business.
Make games I don't want to sell 2 weeks after I buy them?
I still got my original copies of Chrono Cross & Star Ocean 2 from launch day. Just sayin'...
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I don't give a shit what an executive figurehead says out of the corner of his mouth. The outcome is all the matters and game developers are trying to charge the same price for a single use, non-transferable license as they used to charge for transferable media.
Yes that is wrong, because I as a customer have no desire to pay the same or higher price for a reduced value. I will download pirated copies or go without before I willfully entrap myself in this DRM/license pay-per-use dystopia being advanced by IP Rights Holders.
There's nothing wrong with making a profit, but don't complain to congress if you find that your scheme isn't viable in a free market. You'll lose money in your attempt to re-write the social contract.
So, you get the content for free, if you're the original owner, but you need to buy it, if you're a second-hand owner? That's frustrating, but it's not as bad as it could be.
Anyway, my suggestion to them would be to have a market on their own website, where you can auction/sell activation codes to the games that you own. That way, they can track the second hand market, make it easier for people, and also perhaps make a tiny profit off of each sale (say, 5% or 10%). Also, this would make it very easy to trade/sell DLC. In fact, I should probably set up a third party website like this.
Curt
I can see that you might struggle to understand why you shouldn't get a cut every time something you once produced is re-sold. After all, when you buy a used book you send some money to the original publisher right?. And every time you sell your used car, you are happy to make sure a percentage makes its way to the original manufacturer don't you?.
Just think, that beautiful antique Ming vase you brought, the original effort and creativity that went into the painting. It's unique, some Chinese artisan spent months, or even years, of their life making it. They would never do that if they didn't know that hundreds of years later when you bought it at an auction in New York, they were not going to get a cut of that.
Yes, I see your problem. Your problem is that an item's value consists of it's useful value (the value of actually using it), plus the residual value. The residual value is the amount the owner can get by selling the item once they have no further use for it. You are attempting to reduce the residual value artificially. Your problem is that reduces the actual value of the game over all. So guess what? people won't pay you as much for it.
Your other problem is that you really don't understand the above.
Meh, If you don't like it, don't buy it. Instead play something else; vote with your wallet. It's not like there's a shortage of games.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
If Ford started selling the key to your car as a "free" app for your smartphone, but anyone buying that same car second hand had to shell out $1500 for a new "key," how long do you think it would take for before either a) congress enacts a law outlawing the practice, or b) FoMoCo's HQ is burnt to the ground?
Or c), GM, Chrysler, VAG, Toyota, Honda, Subaru, BMW, Mercedes, etc all start doing it too and everyone just accepts it as the new norm. Because, sadly, "c" is where the video game world is headed.
This isn't about games being picked out of bargain bin for $5 two or three years after release.
It's about the practice of game stores selling new $60 games, then a couple weeks later buying them back for $8 (or more typically store credit) and re-selling them for $55. It's a practice that sees almost as much money leave consumer pockets but half as much reach the people who actually made the games and is very wide spread. The stores deliberately under-stock new games in order to push people towards the used copies. It's typical to go in a week after release and be told they don't have any new copies, but there are a half dozen used for a couple dollars off.
It's a practice that's bad for the developers, the publishers and fairly bad for the consumers as a whole. Basically bad for everyone but the pawn shops in the middle. It siphons enormous amounts of money out of the industry and is one of the reasons that basically every studio smaller than EA or Ubisoft is forced to sell out or close, regardless of how well liked their games are.
Yes, measures taken to combat this have some nasty collateral damage. No such thing as perfect system in real life.
Sad an AC had to nail it. I would just add this is also completely against one of the cornerstones of capitalism, and that is first sale. once you sell something that's fucking it, then its mine. I can sell it, wipe my ass with it, turn it into ninja stars if that is what i want to do because ITS NOT FUCKING YOURS ANYMORE you asshole! if you want to play that bullshit why the fuck can't we all do it? from now on PCs aren't sold, we're just giving you a one use non transferable license! Now you have to dispose of all PCs because that license isn't transferable! Hey we'll do it to houses too, clear that whole housing market problem right up because after one use you'll have to burn the fucker!
Just because its on a fucking disc or is IP doesn't suddenly give it magical fucking rights, its STILL a product. this kind of bullshit is what i fucking HATE about these cartels, they are trying to be fucking Schrodinger's fucking cat and be in two states at once. On the one hand they are saying "Oh no, you didn't buy the media, you bought a license" well fine, my disc got scratched so i can just download another one since i have a fucking license right? "Oh no, you don't own a license, you have a disc so if its gone you gotta buy another one!" BULLSHIT fucking bullshit! you can NOT eat your cake and have it too assholes! Its either ONE or the other but NOT both, you can't have all then protections and NONE of the liabilities you greedy little piss ants!
Now i apologize if my language has offended anybody but this REALLY pisses me off. this is just big media trying to do an end run around rules that have been there for ages by trying to claim their IP crap is two things at the same time while being NEITHER ONE when it comes to responsibilities. Well fuck you cartels, i'll pirate also before i buy a single thing from this company!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Um, perceived entitlement?
There's something called the first sale doctrine , which applies to books and which logically should extent to all media.
These are attempts to cheat it, just like DVD regions are a cheat attempt at price fixing.
Call things by their true names, will ya?
Because it diminishes the value of the product to the original buyer. I don't buy many secondhand games and never sell them back, so I'll use an example for something I would buy: a decent mac laptop. They're not exactly cheap compared to the Wintel ones, but they have great resale value. I may not want to spend $1k on a laptop, but if I can buy it use it for a year and sell it for $800+, I'm no longer asking myself "Do you want to spend $1k?" It's become "Do you want to spend $200 to have this for a year?" The fact that I can sell the thing easily makes me a willing primary buyer.
ObCarAnalogy: It's as if when you buy the car, you can never sell it. You can blow it up, you can park it in your garage, you can cut the top off and plant plants in it, but you can never sell it. Suddenly cars have become very, very expensive for people who only keep them for a year or two. Those people will start buying fewer cars.
Um... you do know what the F2p model is right? it's a giant DLC farm (if you want anything good you pay for it), and if you're only there for free you exists as a product to keep some other sucker paying 100 dollars a month for the game. That's what F2P is. Free to play is in no way free. They're going to try and hook you into 'well I spend 10 dollars, what's 10 more?" or "well I could spend 15 dollars a month on WoW, why not 15 dollars for that new Tank or gold to buy tanks or whatever. If there isn't one person paying 150 dollars for every 9 people who pay nothing they're going out of business as would Blizzard if they had no subscription revenue. If you aren't the sucker paying 150 dollars a month then their goal is to make you into that sucker, or you to die for that sucker to feel good about his 150 dollars a month.
Which works remarkably well at generating revenue, and is a perfectly valid business model. But one should be under no illusion what they're doing.
I dunno - I have been playing it since the closed beta, and didn't shell out a penny, yet i don't see getting steamrollered just because of that. If i'm getting screwed somehow, then i'm pretty fucking happy about it.
Even better example would be TF2 where the things that are exclusively for purchase don't affect game balance at all.
The point is though - yes, this is a business model, and yes , it's aimed at generating revenue, but it is remarkably customer-friendly. The business model mentioned in the article above is just heavy duty assholery attempting to bypass existing laws and screw customers over.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
Sheer poetry from the Dean of Science Fiction, early in his career and long before he was famous.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And this is why I stopped gaming all together. In the limited free time I do have I like doing something I enjoy. Fighting with locked down software isn't on the "fun" list. I can't name a single new game that works properly on my laptop simply due to the copy protection. I always have to use a networked dvd drive cause the one in my laptop can't deal with all their stupid schemes. I'd rather use my money to light a fireplace than pay for a game like that.
I think that you miss the point. Nobody is trying to stop them from making a profit. This isn't about us trying to make them poor, it's about people being fed up with companies acting more like parasites trying to squeeze more revenue from their product their predecessors did and is worth paying. They treat the consumers like they need their products. They forget that people aren't always able or willing to pay higher and higher prices for their merchandise.
Sure, F2P games are often there to provide a profit. We don't have a problem with that like we didn't have a problem buying and trading games back in the 80's and 90's. When I was growing up, part of the fun of buying a game was that after you got bored with it, you could trade it off with one of your friends. You'd still buy the latest games that came out when you had the cash, but your old games still held value. Even in this new age, I still enjoy breaking out the old Nintendo games sometimes.
As a side note, there are many truly free games out there. It's called OSS. I know that some people will complain about the low quality compared to the more polished proprietary games, but at least we have some free options. As for me, I haven't found any game, for pay or for free, that I enjoy as much as nethack. So, let them make a profit, but when that profit is made to spite the consumer, I say it's time to look for an alternative.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
When a company sells you a game, there has to be some sort of means of guaranteeing that you can continue to play it in the future. I buy PC games because of two main reasons. PCs never become obsolete, you can always get a new an better PC. It's not like a console where you find yourself screwed into buying a new obsolete console when your old one dies to play old games. I recently played Falcon 2.0 from Spectrum Holobyte for a retro feel... I admit, I didn't have a 5.25" floppy drive anymore, but I did have the 5.25" diskette itself. So I downloaded a pirated copy of the game to play it. But I could play it after all this time. So my second reason is, I want to know, even if the company who makes the game goes out of business, I can still play it.
So, this type of DRM is a great reason not to buy the game since I won't be able to play it later. It has a limited life span.
The only perceived entitlement is that of the publisher and maker believing that they have a right to a percentage of all sales: used, new or otherwise.
I also like how being a business makes you inherently not evil. Just replace “business” with “assassin” and you've described the “free market”. Just because I kill people for money doesn't make me evil. I'm just trying make a profit. Now, if I could just get rid of all those government regulations about not killing people. It's really killing my business model. Stupid people and their perceived entitlement to life.
How is it wrong to raise the price? This game is not that previous game you bought for the same price. In the same way Harry Potter is not star wars. They may come on DVD's but they are in no way the same movie.
And in short: you're going to go without. Good or bad the games industry is fed up with used games, and piracy. That means the entire experience is going to require you be authenticated with their service, constantly, and some of the core content will only exist on that service. In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
I think the automobile industry should do this also. Make it so software is required to drive the car, and that software gets downloaded everytime you start the car up.
That way the car manufactures can make money thru the used market without having to actually buy and sell used cars.
Be seeing you...
Because some industry hack told you his wishful thinking and you lapped it up? I'll sell you a controlling interest in the Brooklyn Bridge at a discount rate...
I'm going to summarize this issue:
When you buy a hammer to assemble a bed you just bought, you're perfectly free to sell that hammer once you're finished using it. The hammer manufacturer can not demand that the person you sold it to pays them something too.
And it should be the same with games. If you decide you're done playing with a game and you want to sell it, then you should be free to sell your right to play the game. When you sell a used game, you lose the option to play it again in the future.
Now I know game companies are going to say that a game is designed to be played only once and so if people could just resell their games, they (the companies) would go out of business. My answer: so what?
First of all, my father had only one hammer since he moved out of his parent's home when he was 20. He's 60 today and still has that hammer. When I moved out, I bought a hammer (as well as some other tools) and I plan to keep those tools my whole life. There's one hammer per household, and yet hammer manufacturers don't seem to be going out of business.
People don't buy just one video game in their entire life. They buy quite a few. Even when they can freely resell those games, they still buy several games. Also, video games can be more expensive than a hammer. If hammer manufactures can do it, then why can't game studios? I think it's clear that game studios are just trying to use the fact that their product is digital instead of physical to make more money.
Second, if people don't want to keep your game their whole life, then that's your own fault. Major game studios these days release games that last just a few hours (I think the average is 8 hours). Compare this to the 90's when a game could last 50+ hours. 8 hour games also cost quite a lot, usually $50 - $60. Let me rephrase that: you're expected to pay $60 for just 8 hours of entertainment. And then you're expected to pay that again on a regular basis (hence why we have dozens of sequels to most major games - Call of Duty franchise anyone?)
It's normal that when your product is so expensive but is useful only for a few hours, your customers will try to resell it after they're done with it. See, my girlfriend bought a hammer last month because she had to nail a painting to her wall; she never uses a hammer but she decided to keep it instead of selling it to a friend or neighbor, because she might need a hammer again in a few years.
So instead of complaining that customers don't want to keep your game very long and quickly resell it, why don't you make games that people want to play for a while? Some suggestions to achieve that:
- Longer storyline that lasts 50+ hours (like most games in the 90s)
- Stop holding our hand and penalize getting killed within the game! I played Modern Warfare and when I died, I came back to life right where I had fallen. No wonder I finished the game in a single afternoon! And by the end I hated the game, because while too hard is frustrating, too easy is boring.
- Add a reason to replay the game. For instance, I recently played a game where after finishing the campaign, I could restart a new campaign with all my earned skills, weapons and upgrades. This also enabled me to access secret areas and do stuff you can't do the first time you play. Just don't over do it - replaying the entire game 10 times just to pick up some development art sucks.
- Make expansions to the game. Lots of them. For 5+ years. I hate sequels because sequels add content but also remove some of it. Good expansions (i.e. not cheap DLC that add a costume or a new gun but expansions that are almost as big as a full game) are what I look for. In sandbox games, it's also fun to have one huge map in the same game rather than 3 smaller maps spread through 3 games (think of Grand Theft Auto series and what it would have been like if you could play in Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas all at once, from the same game).
Just by using expansions, you can make your game last years. You can even price expansions the
This "take it or leave it" attitude is part of the problem. Aside from there being a lot of sly deception (does it clearly state on the box that you are buying a license rather than a game, and that it is worth less second hand, and that if you buy second hand you get a cut down version?) companies need to form relationships with their customers, and part of any relationship is a two way dialogue.
Customers have every right to complain, and in fact in this case it is absolutely vital because if they don't and the game fails to sell it will be blamed on piracy. We need to make it clear that the nasty DRM is what made it fail in the marketplace.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Good or bad the games industry is fed up with used games, and piracy.
Yeah, and I want a pony.
No it isn't. It isn't a compromise at all.
How much do games cost in the store? How much did they cost 10 years ago? 20? 30? Games have gotten cheaper when inflation is taken into account. Here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/10/an-inconvenient-truth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time.ars
we have decided to offer the base game without any of the optional expansions for a reduced price
It's believed that consumers take the price of good as a reflection of quality. If you see a game that is $40 on a shelf that's filled with $60 games most people will assume that there is something wrong with that $40. I'm not saying that the American games retail market can't change but I doubt it.
Selling a dlc expecting game for the price of a full title, selling the dlc for premium prices on top of that, and offering some dlcs as special exclusives is *not* a compromise.
...
Don't shut out second-hand buyers. Offer them the missing content for a reasonable fee. This way you stand to monetize the 2nd and 3rd hand sales.
I don't know what game you're complaining about but it isn't Amular. If you buy Amular new then you also receive a code to buy the dlc for free. If you buy Amular used and if it doesn't come with an unused code then you can purchase the dlc like normal. You seem to be arguing that the companies should be doing exactly what they are doing.
Yep. And there's a difference between a new business model that attempts to bypass fair use policies and alienate their own userbase ,and one that doesn't, much like there's a difference between a new position from kamasutra and unpleasant things involving ass and a broom handle.
In other words, i'm not saying we won't be seeing such attempts, but that they are flat out wrong, and I don't feel like letting myself be ripped off.
Ah.. so when you resell the car, the trunk should lock, the A/C should stop working, and the gas mileage should drop from 27mpg to 21mpg.
We want to keep the "premium" car experience to first purchasers.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Well, I suppose that depends on how you go about increasing the prices.
I mean, if all Shilling wanted was to raise the price he could have simply, you know, charged more money for the product and then we'd not be having this silly conversation.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
When was the last time you had to agree to 'terms' when purchasing your game? You don't get to learn about them until you get home and open the box, or even until you finish installing it.
Why should those terms be enforced? Why should their violation be considered copyright infringement? You bought a copy, now you should be able to do with it whatever you want. Including reselling it.
"And what happens when there is nothing else?"
Games are toys. There will always be toys. Crave something different.
Today it is games and toys. Tomorrow, it will be tools and necessities. We fight this battle over baubles in the hopes that we will not have to fight over the things that really matter.
A couple of things you're missing here:
1/ Their 'contracts', EULAs, whatever are not sacrosanct, they are subject to various laws and quite likely violate consumer laws in many countries; they rely on having more lawyer money than you to counteract this. This *should not* be a viable business model - to break the law and get away with it because of how much money you have. If they don't want to do business under certain countries' consumer laws they should just not sell their products in those countries, but they want it both ways.
2/ They treat the transaction as a simple sale when it suits them and a license when it doesn't. If they are effectively tying you to a onerous and difficult to understand contract which limits your rights such as return, resale, reinstallation etc. in various ways, this should be made clear at the point of sale - there should be a license/contract document for you to sign saying you understand these provisions and agree to them (subject to consumer and contract law). Why don't they do this? Because they want to falsely make out that it *is* a simple sale. This is fraudulent and should be stopped - and hopefully will be stopped when someone makes an appropriate legal challenge in a country with sane consumer laws.
So he's not just some random executive, he's a gamer at heart.
A gamer who wants to badly fuck other gamers over to make an easy buck. It's utterly absurd that he thinks he has a right to perpetual profits after the original point of sale for a particular copy of a game.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
That means the entire experience is going to require you be authenticated with their service, constantly, and some of the core content will only exist on that service. In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
And that means that there will be a lot more piracy or people who just stop buying from the major game studios until they quit being greedy little shits who think they can violate the doctrine of first sale to make perpetual profits off of one copy of a game.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Just wait until the copyright expires.
That's great, so roughly 45 years after my unborn grandchildren die of old age, the copyright will finally expire.
but definitely don't steal it.
First off, you cannot steal something if they still have the item. Secondly, by their own words, buying used = pirating, so why not? The greedy fucks view it the same, so why pay any money to Gamestop for it then?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
i think your inventing a point about something that has nothing to do with piracy .
if i'm a developer and want to sell a game for $42.00 - $48.00 to a game store and they want to buy it and we can come to an agreement then that should be okay. what happens to the game after is none of my business. the store now owns this copy of the game.
If the store wants to sell it to customer a for $59.00 and customer a agrees with this then that should be okay to. what happens from here on out is no-one's business other than customer a. customer a owns the copy now.
if customer a now wants to sell it back to the store for $5 and the store wants to buy it for that price. then no one is doing anything wrong and no one other than customer a and the store are involved in the transaction.
if then the store wishes to sell it to customer b for $54.95 and customer b accepts then go for it. the copy of the game is now customer b's.
if you can give me a single valid reason why any of these transactions are immoral or advise where the developer should get more money then i shall concede that something should be done to hinder the used game market.
resale of goods occurs in every other market, and no one has a problem with it. i don't understand why developers believe they should have some extra right to stop resale of their goods. nor do i understand why they get away with planned obsolescence in their products(which many of the schemes to combat the used game market are). planned obsolescence is a breach of consumer rights in at least the UK.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
When my local Game store has a section for "PC games" and a section for "PC non-transferable licenses to temporarily play games at the rightsholders' sufferance" your argument will be more valid. In the meantime the vast majority of customers aren't going to be sufficiently aware of the issues until it's too late.
I'd just say it's about them double-dipping and trying to work around the first-sale doctrine.
Once a game is bought new, the creator shouldn't be able to say shit about how it's used. Licenses and CD-keys should be 100% transferable.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
i think your inventing a point about something that has nothing to do with piracy .
He's not inventing it. He's just echoing sound-bites from a half-dozen different press releases whining about the evils of the used game market. We don't see them a lot on slashdot, but on sites like, for example, The Escapist, every few months there's a new press-release from some butt-hurt developer telling people that customers who buy used games are no better than pirates.
And said sites are full of people like the OP, who seem to be about even money between being "reputation management"-level shills, or just empty-headed industry cheerleaders supporting these scumbags to the detriment of their own interests.
That investment is people's salaries, rent on the buildings, power bills, computer and desks.
Oh boo freaking hoo. Most of us would be out on the street from one significant financial slip-up, but we're supposed to pity the boneheaded fuckers in the game industry who can't tell good business from their own assholes?
All they have to do is sell the games cheap and DRM-free to turn pirates into customers. It's not fucking rocket science. People will be able to pirate your games just as easily either way. In the current situation, the incentive to pirate is driven by horrific DRM and a $60+ cost, and the disincentive is a little bit of up-front effort. Sell the game for under $20 without DRM and probably half of the pirates become customers, while you retain all your old customers, and you get new customers who couldn't afford your games before or were offended by the DRM! The downside? Fucking nothing! You can lay off your DRM developers who can crawl back into the dark pit they came out of and shut down your DRM servers. Your initial costs are CUT, your running costs are CUT, and it BRINGS IN MORE REVENUE. Figure it out morons!
As for used games, if you sell your games cheap and DRM-free with online backup and official support, why would anyone buy used? Seriously it's astounding that these are the idiots who get rich.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Economically, there is no difference between not buying and pirating.
That's untrue. Resale allows the original purchaser to recoup some of the cost of buying the product. This either makes the product more valuable (i.e. the seller can charge a higher price for the new product), or means the buyer has more money to spend on the next product they want (so they can buy more games or higher priced games as a result). At the end of the day, this means that the publishers should be making more money from each purchaser since a proportion of the money flows up from the resale activities.
Of course, the publishers are restricting resale, under the premise that if people can't buy a used game at a knock-down price, they will instead buy a brand new one at full price. If this were true, then preventing resale would make sense. However, IMHO this isn't going to happen - people only have a certain amount of money to spend on games, and if they can't get old ones for the knock-down price they will either buy less games or turn to the black market.
All this is, of course, disregarding the loss of sales from the primary purchasers who boycott as a result of feelng that they are being abused by the vendor.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
They are fed up with the Doctrine of First Sale, yet whine when everyone else gets even more fed up with the rest of the copyright law.
I guess we're headed for another great video game crash; the combination of incompetence, rising development costs and feelings of entitlement reaching the level of absurd hubris in the industry are a deadly combination. Now if only they'll take the movie and music industries with them, we can start cleaning the corruption they have inflicted on us, such as ACTA.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
A gamer who wants to badly fuck other gamers over to make an easy buck.
The most hilarious thing is that he doesn't understand how markets work at all.
People discount the price they're willing to pay by the amount they'll get back later if they sell used. When I go out and sell a used game for $20 that I originally paid $50 for, that's $20 I put toward the purchase of the next new game I buy. If I don't have that $20 in my pocket, I'm not paying more than $30 for the next game because I literally don't have the money anymore. Meanwhile, the guy who would have bought the game used from me has still only got $20 to buy a game, and if the game doesn't cost $20 then he can't afford it either.
There are three actual ways to make more money selling video games: Either you set the price more appropriately (because it's either higher or lower than the sweet spot, which means that volume times price is not maximized), or you make better games so that more people buy them, or you make games that are just as good more efficiently so that you have lower costs against the same revenues. There is no option that says "fuck over your paying customers" because that doesn't work.