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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.'"
First sale doctrine. QED.
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.
I am single dad with a single income but I have two teenage sons who like to play games. When something hot comes out like Gears of whatever, I buy a new copy. But for other games they wait until it's available used. I can't afford a new version of everything. I think that what they are doing is, at the least, mean-spirited.
http://www.busyweather.com/
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
Curt Schilling, the CEO, is an ex-Major League Baseball pitcher who is likely headed for the Hall of Fame (he lead three different teams to 4 World Series). He turned his video game hobby, marketable name and tens of millions in the bank into a post-baseball career as game studio head. In parallel, he has flirted with the idea of entering politics as a conservative Tea Party-type candidate, and wrote occasional political as well as baseball commentary on his 38 pitches blog.
To nobody's surprise, 38 Studios (38 was Schilling's uniform number with the Red Sox) soon fell well behind schedule on their AAA game, and was hemorrhaging cash. They tried to get Massachusetts (their original home base) to guarantee a loan, but Mass said no. However, a business development board for Rhode Island (a notoriously poorly run state with a longtime corruption problem) agreed to co-sign a $75 million (!) loan, on the conditions that 1) 38 Studios relocate to RI; 2) RI gets a substantial equity stake in the company; and 3) 38 Studios agrees to meet an aggressive schedule of hiring hundreds of RI citizens to good-paying staff positions. The board is hoping that Schilling's company will help spark the emergence of a tech industry in RI. That's a big reason why they have so many employees, and why they have little or no wiggle room in cutting consumers a break. They need the revenues, now!
You may have noticed that they missed the 2011 Christmas season (as well as 2010, etc). Lots of Democrats pointed out that by accepting the government-guaranteed loan, Schilling violated all the "small government, free market" principles he'd been espousing in his blog. I've noticed that since the move, Schilling hasn't blogged about politics, and was amusingly silent when Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas refused to join his teammates for the Stanley Cup victory dinner at Obama's White House (just the kind of news item Schilling used to delight in blogging about).
Good luck, Curt.
Not just mean spirited, but bad buisness. I am trying to figure out what box of cracker jacks these CEOs got their MBAs out of... various industries have encountered this for centuries, each has tried to wipe out the 'used' market because it felt they were not getting a good deal out of it, and they each tend to rediscover the same basic problem, the used market puts money into their industry and ads value to their products
Stop used sales, and your product becomes worth less... one might get more of each sale, but the total number of sales tends to go down resulting in a net decrease of income. Sadly, new industries keep forgetting that there is more to a market then the immediate first order effects.. learning how things interconnect is important. grrr.
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.
Actually yes. It involved deception. When you buy a game, there is a reasonable expectation that you will be able to play everything that is in the disc. More over, there is an expectation that you will get a "complete experince".
It's kinda like if you bought out The Dark Knight only to find that the last 15 minutes are locked by a subscription system. Or like going to see a movie and then just before the last part the managers ask you for an extra fee to see the end.
This is the kind of thing that you would expect to be informed beforehand. So while it isn't a crime, it deserves all the backslash it can get, I hope you are not suggesting that the gamers should shush about this.
But... the future refused to change.
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 understand the pressure that publishers are under, and I can understand that they see profit made by GameStop and want a piece - the simple truth is that they just haven't earned a dime of it.
IT'S YOUR BUSINESS MODEL, STUPID! GameStop can only abuse the industry on such a massive scale because of the prices YOU set. And if you offered an online service for users to trade used licenses, not only could you make a bit off the second hand market but you would put GameStop out of business overnight.
Exploiting your customer base and breaking games is NOT acceptable collateral damage.
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.
I, for one, found your specific use of language inspirational and appropriate. Wish you could have worked some rectal pineapple insertion in there though, as the situation calls for it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"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.
You mean, what happens when there is nothing else to entertain yourself? I mean, when you really can't think of anything else, and your life is that bad without entertainment? You invade Afghanistan. There's a long tradition. It's very fun.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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...
No it isn't. It isn't a compromise at all.
A compromise is where both parties give up a little, to reach an "acceptable" solution, where otherwise there is an intractible situation.
Here, we have a game company pushing the envelope to push the transaction in its favor. Right ot wrong, this is not a compromise.
A compromise would be more along the lines of:
"we understand and respect the first sale rights of our customers who buy game discs, but also need to keep the lights on. Because of this, we have decided to offer the base game without any of the optional expansions for a reduced price. We reduced the price due to the extremely vanilla nature of the offering. The expansions can be purchased online as a downloadable content license for a fair price each. The single player basic campaign will not be crippled without the dlc, but the dlc does improve its enjoyability and replay value. You can redownload the dlc expansions any time you like, but they are tied to your user account, and are nontransferable."
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.
You are selling a purposefully deficient gaming experience for full price. This is dick move #1.
You try to make us all feel better by offering an exclusive dlc for "free". This dlc is designed so that second hand players cannot legally get it without buying another copy of the game band new. This is dick move #2.
The non dick-move solutions are as follows:
1) "exclusives" should be promotional only. This means "buy the game before christmas eve, and get this special novelty exclusive dlc for free!" (With the intent that 4 or 5 months later you offer the same dlc for sale for a modest price.) The only other time an exclusive dlc is appropriate is for a specific console vendor promotion. If you plan on selling a slimmed doen base game with the intent of selling dlc to make up for it, then you have to price your offering appropriately. If your game is super ultra vanilla without the dlc, offer it for 30$ instead of 60, and charge another 30$ for the dlc. If you want to bundle, then offer a "free" (ahem.) Download ticket for the dlc in the game pack marked 60$. Don't shut out second-hand buyers. Offer them the missing content for a reasonable fee. This way you stand to monetize the 2nd and 3rd hand sales. These are sales of the dlc that you didn't have to pay merchanising costs for. Instead of complaining that you didn't get those people to spend 60$, accept the 30$ they are spending on the dlc. (If they buy smartly, they can still buy used and get the dlc cheaper than new, which is why they buy used in the first place. People who buy used put up with intrinsic bads like scratched disks, missing manuals, beat up cases and the like already. Don't penalize them harder because you want the full 60$ from their wallets.)
In short: "required" (for the full game experience) non-transferrable dlc is *already* a compromise. Don't be a greedy whorish assfuck by dickishly witholding dlc content from second hand buyers that would happily buy the dlc from you, but don't want to pay your MSRP for the game disk. Don be a greedy whorish assfuck by double dipping your customers with a 60$ brand new disk that requires 20$ or more of seperate dlc to be playable. Those are not compromises. Those are being unreasonable, and you will hurt customer relations, and your brand, resulting in future lost sales.
The second hand market is a reality. Instead of pitching a hissyfit that you can't make only brand new sales, offer to service the second hand purchasers for a modest fee. Monetize the second hand market. Don't try to expunge it.
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
F2P (Free To Play) does NOT equal P2W (Pay To Win).
League of Legends is doing it right; it's free to play, and everything except skins are obtainable, though paying makes you get those faster. I have no problem with that kind of model and have invested about €100 so far over the course of two years.
Battlefield Heroes on the other hand, now there's a game that's pure P2W. Sometimes I play it for a few rounds just to see if it has improved; everytime I find it worse than before. It used to be an awesome game. Nowadays, it's all about how much money you can spend on those über weapons... Makes me sad. :(
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
See, that's not true, Steam is a perfect example of why it isn't.
Valve has managed to create a DRM system that actually adds value to the game for the majority of users. Every single Valve game is just as easy to pirate as games from other publishers, yet they lose very little sales to piracy. Why do you think that is? It is because Valve makes buying from steam more attractive than piracy.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
"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.
... and none of it goes to the original developer!
And why should it? The developer was paid from the initial sale. Part of the value of the product for the initial buyer was the fact that it was his to now keep or sell. Wen you buy something, it's yours, and you have to right to use it, sell it, or throw it away if you want.
How many other industries let you sell something, and then still keep all rights to it? When a car company sells you a car, they don't demand that every time you sell that car, they get a portion of the sale. If you buy fries at McDonalds, your friend doesn't have to pay McDonalds a fee if you give them one of your fries. Suppose that I went out and built a radio and sold it to somebody. You would think I was crazy if I demanded that each time it was sold or given a way, I should get some of the profit. You would think me insane if I pushed laws demanding that you never take it apart or use its parts for other things. And yet, that is exactly what you propose for games. It's interesting to see how you and others like you have been conditioned to express shock and resentment when it's legal for people to do the same things with media that they do with any other legal product.
Also, it's been a while since I've bought any games, but I find it unlikely that somebody would pay 90% of the new product price when they could get the new, out of the box version for only 10% more. Of course, if they would, that only goes to further show how much resentment people are feeling for the manufacturers.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
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.
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)
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
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.
Not only that I have to defend Gamestop a little here - I know several people who work at Gamestop, and three of them are store managers.
Here's how it works according to the fucktard who wrote the article: "The remaining $31.99? Pure profit..."
Now, here's how it works in reality:
- On that one game, Gamestop got $31.99 in profit. That profit went back into the sales figures for the store to pay for new inventory and to pay the wages of the workers and the rent to the property owner (Gamestops are in malls or strip malls, they never own a standalone storefront building on corporate-owned land).
- On several other games, Gamestop plunked down $20-25 in either store credit or cash payout. Those games sat at the $45 price point for a while. Then the $40 price point. Then $35. Then $30. Then $25. Then $20. Somewhere between $25 and $20, the "pure profit" that the fucktard article-writer assumes turned into a loss.
- On even more games, Gamestop plunked down maybe $10-15. The same thing happened. Maybe they managed to sell it at $20-25, maybe they sold it at less.
The short version is, sure, on that ONE used title Gamestop got a net $31.99 profit. Maybe that was enough to pay for one worker for roughly 2 and a half hours worth of time if they're at the standard $12/hour. On a number of other titles, Gamestop barely broke even, or even lost money when the game fell into "crap it's old, get it out of here, chuck it in the $5-10 bargain bin" range. Because that WILL happen to some titles, even if Gamestop shelled out $20-25 for it when it was new.
There's a Gamestop near my location that was posting sales numbers in the top 100 Gamestop stores for most of Christmas. They just got word anyways that they are getting shut down in February. Apparently Gamestop decided rent in the area isn't enough to justify keeping the store open, even with fantastic sales on both the new and used end.
So before you vilify Gamestop, think about that. A lot of the people working those stores are actual gamers. A lot of the people working those stores are trying to make ends meet. And the dirtiest secret of all... the "profits" for an operating Gamestop store are nowhere near CLOSE to what Asshat McDouchebag writing for ShitHardware, a crappy blog site with a broken registration system, came up with by pulling numbers out of his lying ass.