Teiman
1585
Suppose you pass over some tought economical times, and you have to sell all your games.
All these games you have buy for 50$, you will be able to sell them for 50?, nope. His value is much lower. And really, who would want to play a old game, if not for nostalgia sake? most old games have inferior production values, less usability, and so on.
Bits? true. The product may not change, but the value of a videogame, lowers every second.
Again.
Why do I as a gamer want this?
What advantage is it to me to get screwed by Microsoft instead of gamestop?
Why do I want to give the publisher and system owner more control? So they can do fun things like region lock my games and disable them after a set period in order to get me to buy the slightly changed next version?
With Microsoft getting their cut again from the same product, does this mean they will lower new game prices?I really doubt it. More than likely it just means customers getting screwed which has been all too common in the video gaming industry for a long time now.
And EU law says…don’t care, that’s your problem. The right of controlling distribution is exhausted when you sell it once. And if it’s resold? They get all the rights the original purchaser had. Don’t like it? Sell it as a service (a subscription, not a one-off payment), and take on responsibilities in terms of maintenance and uptime.
On the other hand, you can’t burn 10 copies of your Toyota and sell those on craigslist, either…
oh, this debate again. I’m sorry, but I just don’t think it’s right for companies to try to change or ignore laws (First sale), because their product doesn’t fit into them. You’re selling a product that is easy to copy, so you want to take away my rights as a consumer instead of adapting your product/business model to fit into them. Err. No.
It doesn’t infringe on first sale rights. There is no law that says that plastic disc has to retain any value. You are free to sell it, it just won’t be worth anything.
Software doesn’t depreciate in the same way as a physical good, but a game is absolutely worth less a month or two after its initial release.
Except this would be illegal so i don’t see how it has any relation to Microsoft wanting to charge more than once for the same product when other industries don’t.
It’s worth less a month after initial release is because of the resale market. Get rid of that and the price drop may be less severe.
Not at all. PC software value drops too. Everybody who highly anticipates the title buys it at release. A month later, you’re trying for the long tail.
Games have a weird temporal value. They don’t drop in price solely because of the used market. They go down in value because they’ve become “old”. Consider that there is no used PC market and those games often drop precipitously within weeks of launching. Other games retain their value almost indefinitely, like Blizzard titles of Call of Duty, but that’s because their evergreen multiplayer modes keep the demand from ever dropping. For everything else the hype cycle demands that you participate in the discussion around a new game as it happens immediately following release. Somehow being out of sync with the gaming zeitgeist makes people less willing to spend money on a game, even if it’s only a few weeks old.
Um, no. They sold me a disk with a piece of software on it. Just like a bound stack of paper with words on it. The expectation is that once you’ve sold it to me, it is mine to do with as I please, within the bounds of the law. So I can loan it to a friend, sell it, etc., but I can’t distribute copies. Attempts to change this by saying “no, all we’re selling you is a non-transferable license”, when clearly this is not the case, are complete bullshit.
Why? Did it become less fun? Is there “fun decay”? Is there a “sell by” date on a game?
And, if there is, what’s wrong with publishers trying to capture more of that decay by cutting out GameStop of used games?
In this hypothetical they sold you a one time use code to register the game that came with a disc full of data to speed up the installation process. It doesn’t matter what your expectations were if they are explicit about what you actually bought and they don’t interfere with your right to sell an install disc that has no value. Something being what you’re “used to” or “the way it has always been” has no legal weight. It is well within a content producer’s right to change the way they do business.
You must’ve failed to read what I was replying to; step one if everyone insists on having this argument would be to recognize that software (and other intellectual property, which is how software is currently treated and is yet another debate) has very different properties from tangible property.
Typically you are being sold a disk full of bits, and a license that allows to use those bits. The disk is transferable; whether the license is, is another question. Most current law really doesn’t deal with this very well. I agree that much of it is less than satisfactory.
First sale / exhaustion of rights.
EA have, incidentally, abandoned Online Pass because of it’s massive unpopularity.
They abandoned it because they won’t need it on next gen systems that enforce other controls/get used game retailers to cut them in.
Nesrie
1603
They’ve abandoned it because always online negates the necessity of an online pass. They’re tying games to an online account with no possibility of transfering.
Games may not have an expiration, but a few months after release, I am not willing to pay full price. It’s just like a movie. I don’t typically pay more for a new release than I do an oldie but goodie too.
The PC?! And again, review EU law…
EA admitted it’s unpopular…
