[headdie]

and you legally bought the multi as well.  what should be done is the original account deactivated upon activation of a new one.  what they are doing now is selling a product, then taking it away and keeping the money.  how would it be if that when you want to move, you aren't allowed to sell your house?  it just has to be demolished.

no.....

what they are doing is selling a product (the game) with an additional service (online multi play) available only to new customers (people who by the game as new as opposed to people who buy the game second hand)

[BloodEagle]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/8040-Experienced-Points-Bargains-Are-for-Cheaters

Mr. Young brings up a nice point, about diminishing price.  Anyone else remember Player's Choice titles?  I do, and I miss them every day.

[Droid803]

A) We're talking about the 360 and PS3 here, not a PC game.

Oh, well it doesn't concern me then.
Screw consoles.
I don't want to touch em with a fifty-foot stick. Can't mod it? Not buyin' it.

Still, it kinda sucks. (For second-hand buyers)

[General Battuta]

A) We're talking about the 360 and PS3 here, not a PC game.

Oh, well it doesn't concern me then.
Screw consoles.
I don't want to touch em with a fifty-foot stick. Can't mod it? Not buyin' it.

Still, it kinda sucks. (For second-hand buyers)

I had that attitude.

Then I realized what I could get for the price of my video card. 

[Spoon]

I have to feel quilty for buying a used game now?
Next up they want you to stop buying second hand cars 

You shouldn't jump into a thread with a point that was already addressed at some length. 

Reading threads is for chumps 

[Nuke]

I think the real key here is what you mentioned about the turn-around time on the used-games business as-is.  Less than a week after a game hits the shelves, you can wander into a GameStop and find used copies for, say, $40 instead of the retail $60...and what's even better, the guy who traded it back in during that week probably got only $25 for it.  GameStop then goes out of their way to promote these used copies, since they turn a much larger profit on them than they would on new ones.  It's an incredibly shady business model, and I don't blame publishers/developers for wanting to cut into it.

(Of course, I'm not applying this to older out-of-print titles, which are pretty much fair game as far as used copies are concerned.)

this post kind of reminds me of back when i worked at a pawn shop. and two common items happened to be dvds, cds, and video games, and other copyrighted items (like computers with windows installed). it occured to me that we were selling items that the buyer had no legal right to use because of the license restrictions (more likely the previous owner violated it by selling the item to be resold). i always wondered how such businesses get away with resale of copyright material with no returns to the copywrite holders, especially after the major crackdowns in pirating over the last decade and a half.

of course historically it has been 100% acceptable to sell and buy used media (records, tapes, vhs, books, etc), with no concern from copyright holder. cds dvds and video games are no different in many ways from the media of old, so it seems to me to be rather greedy of the copyright holders to get away with crippling the used media market now, when they did not do so in the past. spending money on one shot items seems really bad for the economy (it eliminates a niche and restricts trickle down).

IMO, DRM are killing my playing pleasure  

I have a very, very, very LARGE collection of PC & consoles games, the oldest of them don't had these ****ing protections, only a CD serial number, like HW2. I will precise that I BOUGHT these games. Videogames are my passion, and even I am not rich, I bought them.

Some games, like Ubisoft's ones, need to have an Internet connection available permanently to play, even in single player mode. This is awful. I have only a ****ty 3G connection at home, with limited capabilities, because I live in the middle of nowhere.

Why should I mess myself with another thing than the REAL price of the physical support of my game ? I know, this is the future (look at this : www.onlive.com), but I'm afraid of this future.

It's because of that I really appreciate GOG.com : no DRM, infinite DL of a game (i.e. if you lost the file), good price in regard of the fact you don't have the physical support, goodies and good support.

this brings up another thing drm, multiplayer passwords, dependence on activation and multiplayer master servers, and the like will eventually destroy, a games life span. i still have games going back to the early 90s, and many of the old ones still work with the right os or emulator, most of the ones that dont work are because of an api version incompatibility. when i buy a game i expect it to be functioning 10+ years down the line, after ive been through 4 computers a dozen email addresses, and thousands of different ip addresses. i expect that game to still work as good as when i got it, without any features being crippled. i havent seen drm cripple an old game yet, of course i dont buy very many modern games.

im concerned that some of the meathods theyve implemented to stop piracy have made the games such that they will be unplayable after the developer deems their service life to be over and withdraws support for them (including any servers they may require). i was disappointed when freelancer multiplayer was removed, fortunately some moders and/or hackers got together and remedyed the situation. some developers actually care and take steps to make the games function after they decide to stop supporting it, but most do not. as games age id like it to be the developers and not the hackers and pirates (and sometimes modders) that perserve the games for posterity.

[Mongoose]

It isn't right because of a legal term called "fair use", meaning once you buy it you are legally permitted to resell it. Another term for that is "user's rights". Think of it this way, what if you bought a car and after a couple years you wanted to resell it after you bought a newer one, but the car company has a "single driver" policy, because after all the people on the assembly line or the engineers who designed don't get a cent from resales so it isn't fair. How would you feel about that? If you enjoy letting greedy executives **** you in the ass with overpriced products that don't even allow you to use it fairly or worse cripple your system (or the game) with their DRM then feel free to keep buying, that's the only way to make sure that they keep this up.

The car analogy doesn't really hold up, because you're still allowed to sell your used game, and the buyer is still able to play said game just fine after paying whatever the used price was.  The only thing he doesn't get is the online multiplayer functionality, which is a service tied to the original purchaser.  If you do want to compare it to cars, this initiative is more like buying a car that comes with a year's subscription to Sirius/XM satellite radio.  If you choose to sell that car used, the buyer can still drive the car just fine (provided you didn't foist a lemon on him), but he'll have to pay for his own satellite subscription if he wants to utilize that feature.  I don't really see how forcing someone who bought a $60 for $25 to spend an extra $10 to get online multiplayer represents an undue hardship.

(And as I said to Droid803, this doesn't have anything to do with DRM.)

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/8040-Experienced-Points-Bargains-Are-for-Cheaters

Mr. Young brings up a nice point, about diminishing price.  Anyone else remember Player's Choice titles?  I do, and I miss them every day.

That is a good point, and things like those Greatest Hits lines should make more of a comeback (though I think there are a few publishers who do something like that).  I've yet to buy Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii because it's still pegged at $50, and I haven't had that much money on-hand whenever I've seen it in a store.  I'll still get it eventually, but I would have made the purchase far sooner if it had been discounted in the few years after its release.

A) We're talking about the 360 and PS3 here, not a PC game.

Oh, well it doesn't concern me then.
Screw consoles.
I don't want to touch em with a fifty-foot stick. Can't mod it? Not buyin' it.

The fantastic success of our own community aside, there's more to gaming than just modding.  Ever hear of a few uber-acclaimed series by the names of Mario, Zelda, Metroid, or Final Fantasy?  Last time I checked, they don't appear on PCs, so if you want your fix, guess what you need to own?

[DarkBasilisk]

I'm really getting tired of companies blaming everything but high prices and progressively worse products as the new scapegoat for low sales. I really can't see used game sales accounting for much : someone already bought it. And if it's flying back and forth between the rental store every three days you clearly did something wrong. The solution to crippling used games stores is to stop making games with zero to no replay value. Make stuff that people want to keep playing and they'll keep it instead of selling it at gamestop.

Used game stores are thriving because most people don't have a lot of money, and the industry is turning out $60 games that are only really interesting for a few days. What's more epically stupid is that all the mentioned companies have been doing it on the high draw genre of ... sports games. If you wanted to protect a heavy hitter, maybe. MAYBE that might make fiscal sense. But a lot of people are probably going to give this a thundering 'meh' and not bother. They really deserve to lose money after trying to put out basically the same sports game with different players year after year at full price (Smackdown vs. Raw 2011 is $40 PS2, $50 Wii, $60 PS3).

Starcraft II is quite possibly the only major game i'll consider for a while (and still not getting it immediately, doing a wait and see on whether some of the issues are patch resolved), not even Civ5, since i'm still having fun with 4. Between DRM and high prices, and ultimately unsatisfying games, I've been much happier staying with old stuff and the indy genre. I used to buy a ton of different games all the time, but all the things that originally made me do that are gone. Most often the new games stink or lose their luster within a week, almost no stores have PC's setup for you to try out the games, or put out horrific DRM. I don't have the money to put up with this.

[General Battuta]

I'm really getting tired of companies blaming everything but high prices

High prices how? Accounting for inflation, games are cheaper than they've ever been at $60, and somehow even with inflation the price has remained steady here even as game budgets have tripled.

If price parity with 1995 had been maintained we'd be paying $150 per game and it'd be fair.

The industry is bending over backwards to keep prices low. For all the problems I see with game development, I think people misunderstand how fair pricing has generally been.

[DarkBasilisk]

I'm really getting tired of companies blaming everything but high prices

High prices how? Accounting for inflation, games are cheaper than they've ever been at $60, and somehow even with inflation the price has remained steady here even as game budgets have tripled.

If price parity with 1995 had been maintained we'd be paying $150 per game and it'd be fair.

The industry is bending over backwards to keep prices low. For all the problems I see with game development, I think people misunderstand how fair pricing has generally been.

That would be true if everyone's purchasing power scaled with the price changes. In 1995 I could scrounge together... $40 to buy a game. Today I could scrounge together... $40 to buy a game. Maybe life's been different for other people since 95, but I still doubt that their income has scaled to that point.

Game budgets shouldn't triple. The fact that a lot of us still play older games today means that we'd possibly still buy something along the graphical quality of a ten year old game if it happened to be any good. The industry is hurting because their model sucks, really. A lot of the franchise games instead of being meaningful continuations are now just derivatives meant to try and get more money on a safe idea.

EDIT:
It's like how infomercial prices are about the same as they've been. 19.95 remains the price because that's the amount people feel safe to throw at something minor that was pitched to them as a good idea. I'm sure the company's profit margin on those items isn't as good as it used to be, but they found a way to make it work because they felt they'd make more money without raising the price.

[Bobboau]

in other news toyota is installing DNA sensors that lock onto one customer and cannot be transfered, the car mostly opperates if this sensor fails, but the air conditioner is disabled and it can not go faster than 50MPH.

[Klaustrophobia]

 

[Nuke]

today we have games which did not need to create an entire game engine, they just licensed an engine and supplied their own content, so what you get is essentially a professional grade total conversion. franchise titles usually reuse the same engine, even fs2 was built on the back of its predecessor. game tools have improved greatly, if you license a game engine, a large number of your content creation tools come with it. so i have a very hard time believing that the cost of developing a game have tripled. i may have believed doubled, but tripled, no, unless all this licensing ate up most of the budget.

i still consider $60 fair in some cases, but only for games that are fairly new, around say less that 6 months. if i see a game on the shelf a year after it came out , it better be marked down by at least 50%, more than 2 years later, it better be in the bargin bin for less than $20 bucks. my best score was getting prey for $10 the same year it came out. instead of cutting features to kill the used game market, what they should do is compete with it by selling older new games at greatly reduced prices, and most importantly keep the games in print and support it for longer. i hate seeing the phrase "the customer is always right" replaced with "the customer is stupid and should be treated like cattle". i mean were the ones paying your ****ing employees!

[Bobboau]

all that licensing ate up most of the budget

[Aardwolf]

See, problem is this:

The claim is that the multiplayer is an additional service they provide... except that, if not for deliberate impediments they've put in your way, you wouldn't even need their service to play multiplayer. You've bought the game, it has the stuff you need in order to play multiplayer, and then it's got additional stuff added on that you don't want, don't need, and have to pay extra or be the first owner to have it work normally.

Just like how people realized they didn't need battle.net to play Blizzard games---they could play using bnetd. Until that got shut down¹, thank-you-very-much DMCA anti-circumvention bull****.


¹ In the United States. Outside of the U.S. it's still legal.

[Mongoose]

See, problem is this:

The claim is that the multiplayer is an additional service they provide... except that, if not for deliberate impediments they've put in your way, you wouldn't even need their service to play multiplayer. You've bought the game, it has the stuff you need in order to play multiplayer, and then it's got additional stuff added on that you don't want, don't need, and have to pay extra or be the first owner to have it work normally.

...except you do need their service, since XBL and PSN are controlled multiplayer venues.  Particularly XBL, which requires a membership fee.

[Aardwolf]

Back in my day, we had games over the internet. And they were free.

The only reason you need their service is because they're designing games nowadays so that the game won't work otherwise, not because it actually depends on the service for anything that couldn't be replicated by some other service without the bogus restrictions.

Which is exactly what bnetd was, by the way.

[Scotty]

And now you can either suck it up and play, or take your ball and leave.  Deal with it.

[Aardwolf]

Ah, but I'm a game programmer. I'm going to make my own games, and I'm not going to be a douche about what a user can and can't do with them.

[DarkBasilisk]

And now you can either suck it up and play, or take your ball and leave.  Deal with it.

Possibly. There are option C's on occasion. And i mean this in the sense that sometimes courts decide that Eula's are bull****. Depending on who you get to argue your case, you can say they're contracts of adhesion.