1) I am not union. I have never been union. I think the local machinists union has passed the tipping point and is now abusive. Unions are useful tools to reach equitable employment arrangements. Current union activity is anything but. I will not join any unions.
2) I believe I pointed out that the vast bulk of the blueray discs cost was *****NOT***** the cost of distribution. You *DID* read my reply to you right?
3) who said anything about theatrical showings? I certainly didn't....
Netflix and blockbuster aggregate prices to offer the 8$/Mo deal.
I am not netflix. I cannot negotiate a multimillion dollar licensing deal as a compromise.
I am an ordinary consumer who would get shafted if I tried to get a private viewing license.
Take for instance, your typical blueray disc. This is a dumb storage medium that costs at most 50 cents to fabricate. (This includes screen printing the top, and all that jazz.) At market, this item, which the MPAA insists is a content license and not a physical sale item, costs on average 20 to 40$.
I can purchase a spool of blank bluray discs for that price. The cost is not the cost of distribution, therefor. (The spool of discs also has to be distributed.) Nor is it the price of marketing (the movie is old, and no longer being actively advertised). The majority of the cost is the price of the any-time home viewer content license.
Given that the disc is a digital medium, this is a digital distribution channel. Given that the cost of the disc is at most 50 cents, we must therefor conclude that the cost o a digital media license for a home consumer is around 20 to 40$.
Just how big of a pension plan do these geriatric camera and lighting crews drawing anyway? I'm a fucking aerospace engineer, designing parts for modern aircraft that will be in service for decades, and I don't get any pension plans. I don't feel I need one! I get reimbursed for my work on an hourly basis. After that, the product of my work belongs to my company. I don't magically have any rights to that product, and have no basis for demanding such remittance.
You know what people like me do for retirement?
Save our fucking money and plan for it. Like pretty much everyone else.
By the classical definition of work, if the intended goal is to move the object, the initial push's energy continues to perform an infinite amount of that work, unless the energy is diffused or negated.
It seems to me you are consistently failing to see the point handed to you twice now by another poster.
Old movies have already come to market. The crews that made them got paid over a decade ago. There is no reason to charge 2-5$ for a digitally delivered showing, other then pure greed.
Kindly find some other vector of argument besides "poor, orphan film crews" when discussing OLD movies.
Metal powders are actually quite simple to make. (Even without resorting to mechanical production.
The real issue is that only certain metals could be sintered this way, and that for any kind of good resolution, you would a very tight beam on the laser.
For instance, aluminum would have to be sintered in a hermetically sealed build chamber filled with inert gasses.
On top of that, a sintered piece won't have the same strength as a milled piece. It would have much more in common with a hammer forged casting, and be of comparable mechanical strength for that given material.
Yeah, you are right. I am thinking unconsionable agreements. (Like eulas that require you to give up the right to sue, etc.)
The big issue I have with the whole "license" thing, is that they are saying I, as a customer of their web store, am agreeing to a content license for which I have never seen the terms.
For instance, the terms of their license could clearly spell out what I am licensed to do, and what the boundries of that license are. (Eg, "you have the licensed ability to playback the single copy of the recording bound on the physical medium you have purchased.") Then it would be explicitly clear what I was licensed to do, and what does and does not constitute a breach of license contract.
However, I have never once been greeted with an eula for an riaa affilate's distributed mp3 purchase.
What "exactly" am I purchasing, in terms of license rights? Without seeing the agreement, there is no possible way to uphold all the terms, and as such it should not be even remotely enforcable.
The riaa wants to sell a nebulous "the license is whatever we say it says when we sue you" license. This is beyond unconsionable. Further, it could still run afoul of laches if they don't sue you immediately, because they did not exercise their rights under the agreement in a very timely manner, and permitted the offender to engage in activities the offender honestly thought they were in the clear on.
Likewise, the offender could turn around and claim that the riaa sold them an unlimited redistribution right, as implied by the lack of accompanying verbage, and have just as much say in the matter from that angle. Without the language of the contract, its all up in the air.
The riaa does not want to spell out the terms in concrete language because that would frighten casual buyer....err... "licensors" away from "licensing" the material. Throwing up the big wall o text would make things much harder for non majority age customers (a big slice of the mp3 market) as well, since in many jurisdictions they cannot enter into a contractual agreement by themselves, and requie a legal parent or guardian to enter the contract for them.
This whole thing reeks of "get your act together" with the riaa being a pathetic bunch of goons.
China is communist. Actually uphold communism, and not be a hypicritical bunch of assmonkeys. Invest in infrastructure in your rural areas, and tackle the wealth divide. Make china something other than an international laughingstock.
Alternatively, ditch the communist lipservice, stop censoring the shit out of everything, and let your citizens pull themselves out of the dirt by educating themselves. Stop dumping toxic chemicals into the ocean and into rivers.
In both cases, stop treating people as less than cattle.
The western world needs to stop stroking china's neoindustrialist boner with foriegn investments until one of those two things happens.
When people are starving to death, living in areas so polluted by heavy metals that the chinese govt denies the who access to take soil samples, and where there is such a sickeningly huge divide between wealthy and poor, it should come as no surprise that people will rush from dieing of hunger and poisoning to dieing of overwork and poisoning.
The implied "look, thousands line up for these slave labor positons, so they can't be as bad as everyone says! So, its OK to buy chinese made things!" Is so morally destitute and wrong it defies reason.
Newsflash fuckers. Just because people are lining up to try to crawl their way out of the chinese agricultural infrastructure where they live in straw huts and lack basic sanitation, doesn't make the hellholes they are scambling to get to any less hellish.
This argument, while factually true, is pedantic and broken. It also implies that the riaa is willfully selling unusable goods.
Take an mp3 player. A cheap one, or an ipod. One that doesn't have removable flash storage. To get the mp3 onto the drvice, the "buyer" must copy it with itunes or with a file manager. A copy is made.
Additionally, an mp3 on external storage cannot be directly manipulated/processed. It has to be copied into ram memory. This is true on all noteworthy computing architectures. This is another copy.
To play it on a computer, it gets copied into ram memory, however temporarily. Still, a copy must be made in order to use it.
If they are selling a license to use the mp3, then that must defacto imply a limited right to copy, or else you are violating the implied warantee of merchantability by selling a product that cannot be used for the intended purpose, or are breaking the latches doctrine by engaging in a willfully onesided and abusive contract.
About the same size as an sdcard, but made by sony, and appropriately more expensive, and less versatile.
Sure, they *could* have just used SDcards and enabled the encryption functionality in the industry standard spec... but they are sony. They gotta "innovate".
This is slashdot! We *never* read the article before posting!
Ok, humor aside, the 3 orgs I listed have more fingers in foriegn pies than hentai monsters have tentacles.
Those 3 orgs play the tune that the other crony orgs dance to. I would be flabbergasted if they didn't have their tentacles rammed to the hilt and squirming hard inside on this proceeding. The degree of overlap and collusion between the american orgs, and the localized foreign ones is so great it makes very little sense to segregate them without becoming pedantic.
The RIAA, MPAA, and BSA say "they help people collaborate and conspire to violate copyright, and we demand you shut down access through your pipes! No, we don't have a court order, we just demand you do it!"
2 dutch telecoms go "omg! MPAA, RIAA, and BSA?! OMG! Close the pipes!"
Meanwhile two others go "wtf? Who died and made you god? We are dumb pipes, and just deliver what the internet has to offer. If we filter, we become liable. We don't want to do that voluntarily. Get a court order first so we don't have that liability."
RIAA, MPAA, and BSA go "whaaaaaaaaa! Those bad, bad isps won't comply with our totally reasonable request, and told us to get a court order! They don't trust/believe us! They must be in league with those filthy pirates! Whaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
1) personally, I don't consider quality to be fixed to price. That kind of thinking is how cheap plastic crap gets sold for absurdly high prices. (Like apple computers... a comparatively low end x86 system with a flashy bios, a tpm, and a custom os, is still a comparatively low end x86 with a flashy bios, a tpm, and a custom os. The fact that it costs 1000$ more than a comparable non-apple offering does not magically make the apple computer be of higher quality.)
The fact that everyone is pricing in the same bracket is merely market inertia. Several experiments with alternative pricing have had spectacular results in sales. The real utility in enforcing a status quo price structure like this is that you can turn out filth, market it really good, and reap a tidy profit. (The money you spent on marketing and development of the lacklustre title is easily remitted by the volume of hype driven sales at the de-facto collusion maintained price.)
This is how ea games stays the fuck in business, despite being a terrible company. I do not support this model.
2) the issue here is that they did not give both flavored offerings\they misled customers. When you pay 60$ for a title, expecting to play the living shit out of it and beat it in under a month, then turn around and sell it to a used game store, you expect that you will be able to leverage the full value of what you purchased. Saying the dlc is "free", when in fact it is actually a seperate product in the box with an aggregate price, is being purposefully misleading.
Further, since used game sellers set their prices to the maximum the market will bear, their retail price of the used item is tied proportionally to the first hand sale price. Aggregating the price like that devalues the actually resalable product, while simultaneously inflating the second hand sales price. This is outright dickish.
What they should do is offer both products on the shelf, with very clear and concise labeling. They should offer the more expensive of the two with a little price warfare candy: price the combined unit price 2 to 5% cheaper than buying seperate. Make a point of this on the packaging, so that there is no disconnect with the buyer.
This way second hand game merchants cannot charge the premium price, shoppers that don't want to pay 60$ can buy on the installment plan for a little more overall, and ardent second hand buyers can get a little more satisfaction from their purchase.
This is not what this game company is doing. (And yes, I know I moved the goalpost a little.)
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.
Sadly, when I was a tyke in HS, we were the last pre-internet generation.
However, hilarity *did* ensue when I showed the other gifted kids how to change the desktop pictures and system sounds on the native powermacs the school was using.
Never did I ever imagine the inventiveness that schoolkids could invoke from something as horrible as clarisworks.... never in a million years. It was like graphitti in a newyork subway. Every workstation in the school was vandalized in a different and unique way.
It wasn't long afterward that some serious lockout smackdowns happened.
Really, how is this any different than the commerically incited mass copyright infringements from criaa labels on their back catalogs 3 years ago? Or how they all shamelessly violated copyright on an anticopyright psa?
These fuckers are classic hipocrites. Hello kettle. I am pot. You are black.
They only support "artist interests" when it suits their profit motive. The same is true for their support of copyright.
This is not explicitly true. Many products are routinely sold that can be obtained for free, given the labor of obtaining is a sufficiently arduous task. The person is really buying the convenience of a harvested product.
Take for instance, oxygen, or nitrogen gas. (Especially nitrogen). You gan collect copious quantities of it for free. However, the task of harvesting and refining it is nontrivial, and possibly expensive in both time and invested infrastructure. As such, somebody that basically just pumps and superchills ordinary air, and in so doing fractionally distills out the nitrogen and bottles it (the nitrogen itself is still free), they can sell it as long as there is a demand.
Another example is dirt. You can scoop up dirt for free too, but people still buy it routinely.
See also: manure, compost, etc.
The value of the files, which can be easily sourced, is in the increased convenience of the service, and any implied goods accompanying that service, such as legal indemnification for posession. (Eg, you won't get sued by the riaa for downloading it.)
This value is set by what peope are willing to pay for it. Profitability can only occur if the price people are willing to pay is greater than the costs of offering it for sale.
You could argue that it could never be profitable... that's a reasonable argument. But you can't argue that it can't be sold. (One can sell at a loss.)
The real problem here is that this operation sets real limits on what the ACTUAL market value for the recording industry's digital products really are, instead of the artifically insisted upon values presented in court during infringement cases, and also the cumulative effects that such a service would produce.
Specifically, the recording industry relies on continually reselling copy from its back catalog. (60s and 70s classic rock, 80s music, 90s music, etc...) there is a demand for this because the old storage mediums break down with age, and require replacement. A digital resale locker like redigi permits the new sales of theroetically unaging copies (mp3s don't wear out....) to change hands potentially unlimited numbers of times. Coupled with continued first hand sales, an increasing supply of second hand files can theoretically end up in redigi's possession, saturating the market.
This will greatly impact the ability of the riaa and member labels to continue to snack on replacement/redundant copy sales, which accounts for the vast majority of their revinue stream.
That's why they hate redigi, and also why we should embrace redigi.
Slashdot Mirror
Problems with your argument (angry rant):
1) I am not union. I have never been union. I think the local machinists union has passed the tipping point and is now abusive. Unions are useful tools to reach equitable employment arrangements. Current union activity is anything but. I will not join any unions.
2) I believe I pointed out that the vast bulk of the blueray discs cost was *****NOT***** the cost of distribution. You *DID* read my reply to you right?
3) who said anything about theatrical showings? I certainly didn't....
No, inertia is a formally recognized force.
A new force must be exerted to overcome the inertial force, or the inertial force must be diffused, eg, by friction.
That is neither here nor there though, as there is no such thing as frictionless vaccuum. Virtual particle pairs do exert a small friction force.
Netflix and blockbuster aggregate prices to offer the 8$/Mo deal.
I am not netflix. I cannot negotiate a multimillion dollar licensing deal as a compromise.
I am an ordinary consumer who would get shafted if I tried to get a private viewing license.
Take for instance, your typical blueray disc. This is a dumb storage medium that costs at most 50 cents to fabricate. (This includes screen printing the top, and all that jazz.) At market, this item, which the MPAA insists is a content license and not a physical sale item, costs on average 20 to 40$.
I can purchase a spool of blank bluray discs for that price. The cost is not the cost of distribution, therefor. (The spool of discs also has to be distributed.) Nor is it the price of marketing (the movie is old, and no longer being actively advertised). The majority of the cost is the price of the any-time home viewer content license.
Given that the disc is a digital medium, this is a digital distribution channel. Given that the cost of the disc is at most 50 cents, we must therefor conclude that the cost o a digital media license for a home consumer is around 20 to 40$.
Just how big of a pension plan do these geriatric camera and lighting crews drawing anyway? I'm a fucking aerospace engineer, designing parts for modern aircraft that will be in service for decades, and I don't get any pension plans. I don't feel I need one! I get reimbursed for my work on an hourly basis. After that, the product of my work belongs to my company. I don't magically have any rights to that product, and have no basis for demanding such remittance.
You know what people like me do for retirement?
Save our fucking money and plan for it. Like pretty much everyone else.
By the classical definition of work, if the intended goal is to move the object, the initial push's energy continues to perform an infinite amount of that work, unless the energy is diffused or negated.
Or are you trying to redefine work?
It seems to me you are consistently failing to see the point handed to you twice now by another poster.
Old movies have already come to market. The crews that made them got paid over a decade ago. There is no reason to charge 2-5$ for a digitally delivered showing, other then pure greed.
Kindly find some other vector of argument besides "poor, orphan film crews" when discussing OLD movies.
Thanks.
Metal powders are actually quite simple to make. (Even without resorting to mechanical production.
The real issue is that only certain metals could be sintered this way, and that for any kind of good resolution, you would a very tight beam on the laser.
For instance, aluminum would have to be sintered in a hermetically sealed build chamber filled with inert gasses.
On top of that, a sintered piece won't have the same strength as a milled piece. It would have much more in common with a hammer forged casting, and be of comparable mechanical strength for that given material.
First they have to discover adamantium.
Trust me, if the stuff existed it would be all the rage in aerospace.
Yeah, you are right. I am thinking unconsionable agreements. (Like eulas that require you to give up the right to sue, etc.)
The big issue I have with the whole "license" thing, is that they are saying I, as a customer of their web store, am agreeing to a content license for which I have never seen the terms.
For instance, the terms of their license could clearly spell out what I am licensed to do, and what the boundries of that license are. (Eg, "you have the licensed ability to playback the single copy of the recording bound on the physical medium you have purchased.") Then it would be explicitly clear what I was licensed to do, and what does and does not constitute a breach of license contract.
However, I have never once been greeted with an eula for an riaa affilate's distributed mp3 purchase.
What "exactly" am I purchasing, in terms of license rights? Without seeing the agreement, there is no possible way to uphold all the terms, and as such it should not be even remotely enforcable.
The riaa wants to sell a nebulous "the license is whatever we say it says when we sue you" license. This is beyond unconsionable. Further, it could still run afoul of laches if they don't sue you immediately, because they did not exercise their rights under the agreement in a very timely manner, and permitted the offender to engage in activities the offender honestly thought they were in the clear on.
Likewise, the offender could turn around and claim that the riaa sold them an unlimited redistribution right, as implied by the lack of accompanying verbage, and have just as much say in the matter from that angle. Without the language of the contract, its all up in the air.
The riaa does not want to spell out the terms in concrete language because that would frighten casual buyer....err... "licensors" away from "licensing" the material. Throwing up the big wall o text would make things much harder for non majority age customers (a big slice of the mp3 market) as well, since in many jurisdictions they cannot enter into a contractual agreement by themselves, and requie a legal parent or guardian to enter the contract for them.
This whole thing reeks of "get your act together" with the riaa being a pathetic bunch of goons.
Curious how you would say something like that.
Solution? How about this one.
China is communist. Actually uphold communism, and not be a hypicritical bunch of assmonkeys. Invest in infrastructure in your rural areas, and tackle the wealth divide. Make china something other than an international laughingstock.
Alternatively, ditch the communist lipservice, stop censoring the shit out of everything, and let your citizens pull themselves out of the dirt by educating themselves. Stop dumping toxic chemicals into the ocean and into rivers.
In both cases, stop treating people as less than cattle.
The western world needs to stop stroking china's neoindustrialist boner with foriegn investments until one of those two things happens.
Who as in world health organisation. Not "the who".
When people are starving to death, living in areas so polluted by heavy metals that the chinese govt denies the who access to take soil samples, and where there is such a sickeningly huge divide between wealthy and poor, it should come as no surprise that people will rush from dieing of hunger and poisoning to dieing of overwork and poisoning.
The implied "look, thousands line up for these slave labor positons, so they can't be as bad as everyone says! So, its OK to buy chinese made things!" Is so morally destitute and wrong it defies reason.
Newsflash fuckers. Just because people are lining up to try to crawl their way out of the chinese agricultural infrastructure where they live in straw huts and lack basic sanitation, doesn't make the hellholes they are scambling to get to any less hellish.
This argument, while factually true, is pedantic and broken. It also implies that the riaa is willfully selling unusable goods.
Take an mp3 player. A cheap one, or an ipod. One that doesn't have removable flash storage. To get the mp3 onto the drvice, the "buyer" must copy it with itunes or with a file manager. A copy is made.
Additionally, an mp3 on external storage cannot be directly manipulated/processed. It has to be copied into ram memory. This is true on all noteworthy computing architectures. This is another copy.
To play it on a computer, it gets copied into ram memory, however temporarily. Still, a copy must be made in order to use it.
If they are selling a license to use the mp3, then that must defacto imply a limited right to copy, or else you are violating the implied warantee of merchantability by selling a product that cannot be used for the intended purpose, or are breaking the latches doctrine by engaging in a willfully onesided and abusive contract.
Too late.
Sony has already released the new umd.
The playstation vita card.
About the same size as an sdcard, but made by sony, and appropriately more expensive, and less versatile.
Sure, they *could* have just used SDcards and enabled the encryption functionality in the industry standard spec... but they are sony. They gotta "innovate".
What!? Read the ****ing article?!
This is slashdot! We *never* read the article before posting!
Ok, humor aside, the 3 orgs I listed have more fingers in foriegn pies than hentai monsters have tentacles.
Those 3 orgs play the tune that the other crony orgs dance to. I would be flabbergasted if they didn't have their tentacles rammed to the hilt and squirming hard inside on this proceeding. The degree of overlap and collusion between the american orgs, and the localized foreign ones is so great it makes very little sense to segregate them without becoming pedantic.
The RIAA, MPAA, and BSA say "they help people collaborate and conspire to violate copyright, and we demand you shut down access through your pipes! No, we don't have a court order, we just demand you do it!"
2 dutch telecoms go "omg! MPAA, RIAA, and BSA?! OMG! Close the pipes!"
Meanwhile two others go "wtf? Who died and made you god? We are dumb pipes, and just deliver what the internet has to offer. If we filter, we become liable. We don't want to do that voluntarily. Get a court order first so we don't have that liability."
RIAA, MPAA, and BSA go "whaaaaaaaaa! Those bad, bad isps won't comply with our totally reasonable request, and told us to get a court order! They don't trust/believe us! They must be in league with those filthy pirates! Whaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
That about sum it up?
That's fantastic!
The question I have though, is why don't they also offer the non-cupon version for 50$, given that the dlc costs 10$?
1) personally, I don't consider quality to be fixed to price. That kind of thinking is how cheap plastic crap gets sold for absurdly high prices. (Like apple computers... a comparatively low end x86 system with a flashy bios, a tpm, and a custom os, is still a comparatively low end x86 with a flashy bios, a tpm, and a custom os. The fact that it costs 1000$ more than a comparable non-apple offering does not magically make the apple computer be of higher quality.)
The fact that everyone is pricing in the same bracket is merely market inertia. Several experiments with alternative pricing have had spectacular results in sales. The real utility in enforcing a status quo price structure like this is that you can turn out filth, market it really good, and reap a tidy profit. (The money you spent on marketing and development of the lacklustre title is easily remitted by the volume of hype driven sales at the de-facto collusion maintained price.)
This is how ea games stays the fuck in business, despite being a terrible company. I do not support this model.
2) the issue here is that they did not give both flavored offerings\they misled customers. When you pay 60$ for a title, expecting to play the living shit out of it and beat it in under a month, then turn around and sell it to a used game store, you expect that you will be able to leverage the full value of what you purchased. Saying the dlc is "free", when in fact it is actually a seperate product in the box with an aggregate price, is being purposefully misleading.
Further, since used game sellers set their prices to the maximum the market will bear, their retail price of the used item is tied proportionally to the first hand sale price. Aggregating the price like that devalues the actually resalable product, while simultaneously inflating the second hand sales price. This is outright dickish.
What they should do is offer both products on the shelf, with very clear and concise labeling. They should offer the more expensive of the two with a little price warfare candy: price the combined unit price 2 to 5% cheaper than buying seperate. Make a point of this on the packaging, so that there is no disconnect with the buyer.
This way second hand game merchants cannot charge the premium price, shoppers that don't want to pay 60$ can buy on the installment plan for a little more overall, and ardent second hand buyers can get a little more satisfaction from their purchase.
This is not what this game company is doing. (And yes, I know I moved the goalpost a little.)
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.
Sadly, when I was a tyke in HS, we were the last pre-internet generation.
However, hilarity *did* ensue when I showed the other gifted kids how to change the desktop pictures and system sounds on the native powermacs the school was using.
Never did I ever imagine the inventiveness that schoolkids could invoke from something as horrible as clarisworks.... never in a million years. It was like graphitti in a newyork subway. Every workstation in the school was vandalized in a different and unique way.
It wasn't long afterward that some serious lockout smackdowns happened.
Wouldn't that be "quanta" instead of "quantum"?
More than one kind of radiation in a cme gas cloud... doesn't make sense to measure only one.
There are some things money can buy.
For everything else, there's lobbyists.
Really, how is this any different than the commerically incited mass copyright infringements from criaa labels on their back catalogs 3 years ago? Or how they all shamelessly violated copyright on an anticopyright psa?
These fuckers are classic hipocrites. Hello kettle. I am pot. You are black.
They only support "artist interests" when it suits their profit motive. The same is true for their support of copyright.
No silly! Execution usually involves either an electric chair, leathal injections or a fireing squad.
Executable flies are flies that you can execute with a can of RAID.
Ahhhh... CIH1019... I remember it well.
(Waxes nostalgic.)
This is not explicitly true. Many products are routinely sold that can be obtained for free, given the labor of obtaining is a sufficiently arduous task. The person is really buying the convenience of a harvested product.
Take for instance, oxygen, or nitrogen gas. (Especially nitrogen). You gan collect copious quantities of it for free. However, the task of harvesting and refining it is nontrivial, and possibly expensive in both time and invested infrastructure. As such, somebody that basically just pumps and superchills ordinary air, and in so doing fractionally distills out the nitrogen and bottles it (the nitrogen itself is still free), they can sell it as long as there is a demand.
Another example is dirt. You can scoop up dirt for free too, but people still buy it routinely.
See also: manure, compost, etc.
The value of the files, which can be easily sourced, is in the increased convenience of the service, and any implied goods accompanying that service, such as legal indemnification for posession. (Eg, you won't get sued by the riaa for downloading it.)
This value is set by what peope are willing to pay for it. Profitability can only occur if the price people are willing to pay is greater than the costs of offering it for sale.
You could argue that it could never be profitable... that's a reasonable argument. But you can't argue that it can't be sold. (One can sell at a loss.)
The real problem here is that this operation sets real limits on what the ACTUAL market value for the recording industry's digital products really are, instead of the artifically insisted upon values presented in court during infringement cases, and also the cumulative effects that such a service would produce.
Specifically, the recording industry relies on continually reselling copy from its back catalog. (60s and 70s classic rock, 80s music, 90s music, etc...) there is a demand for this because the old storage mediums break down with age, and require replacement. A digital resale locker like redigi permits the new sales of theroetically unaging copies (mp3s don't wear out....) to change hands potentially unlimited numbers of times. Coupled with continued first hand sales, an increasing supply of second hand files can theoretically end up in redigi's possession, saturating the market.
This will greatly impact the ability of the riaa and member labels to continue to snack on replacement/redundant copy sales, which accounts for the vast majority of their revinue stream.
That's why they hate redigi, and also why we should embrace redigi.