Cliff Bleszinski: Don't Punish Pre-Owned Buyers

[Daveman]

Hell I almost exclusively buy pre-owned games. But I never pirate.

 

[Lionsfan]

That's a horrible excuse. If you need, absolutely NEED, that $5 to afford dinner that evening, you have much better things to spend your money on then a $60-$70 game. If you can afford it without scraping all your pennies together, I truely don't think that $5 is going to matter much in the long run for you. Who it'll matter for though is the people making the games so they can continue to stay in business.

However horrible you think my reasoning is, saving money always helps. And 5 bucks won't make a difference to companies who are earning million dollar profits

That $5 will, you know why? Because of the other $65 is going towards the retailer, the people mearely selling the game, and none, NONE, of it to the people who have made the game. Combine that with the percentage of people who buy used instead of new, and yes, you do have a massive difference.

Well it's clear you and I won't agree. I think Project 10 or whatever it's called sucks and you don't. But I'm the only loser since it's going to happen no matter what

 

[Richard Allen]

Holy crap - an industry personality that game buyers, even pre-owned buyers are still game buyers.

respect +1.

-m

A pre-owned buyer isn't really a buyer. None of that money goes to the game developers, just the retailers, and considering the relationship between retailers and publishers borders on actively hostile it's practically like funding "the enemy".

I don't understand what Cliffy is getting at with, "more flies with honey than with vinegar..." The free $10 worth of DLC is honey to entice people to buy the game new.

So you buy all of your cars new right? And every apartment or home that may interest you is brand new, specifically made for you to purchase new right? You don't have to answer me, I know the answer. Project $10 would be illegal in ever sense of the word if our laws could keep up with the pace of modern technology and development. Please don't tell me that you think it is ok to have features like cruise control or air conditioning enabled only if you buy a car new, the first sale doctrine was made for a reason and eventually I hope to god our laws catch up because this should be straight up illegal... $10 fucking dollars to play multi-player, yea you continue ruining what others have enjoyed for years while not sending publishers out of business buy eating up this shit /end rant

You're forgetting the fact that cars aren't usually considered "intellectual property" while games are. That's a big difference. When you buy a car, you buy a physical copy which you then own fully. When you buy a game, you only buy the equivalent of a pass. Sure, you can play it. But the game doesn't belong to you.

It's like buying a ticket to the movies, and then managing to pass it on to the next person after watching the movie (which is generally impossible given how movie tickets have parts that get torn off exactly for that purpose). See the difference?

A game doesn't give you ownership of it's content. It gives you the (usually permanent) "ticket" to see said content. A car, on the other hand, is something you own fully and can do whatever you want with it.

When you go to a movie you are paying to use the theaters equipment to view the movie in a way that would not be possible (well for most), they are not the same thing. When you buy a movie on dvd you are free to resell it as much as you want but you don't own the rights to it. The first sale doctrine is meant specifically for that reason, the creator of copyrighted works can not dictate if you resell a painting or song, and by recent court decisions software. By disabling features they are basically getting around this law by devaluing your content so it's not worth it to sell. This is a very different situation and if you look at it from a dvd perspective I think that is pretty obvious. The fact that you are arguing that I don't own my game that I very much payed for and do own is disappointing since everyone has property rights in the USA but then it comes to digital and all of a sudden we loose all those rights because some lawyer rights up a EULA and says you don't own this. It's pure BS and greed. To take it back to the car level, it's the same exact thing as if they made things not work on a car when you resold via the software that controls it, by your argument this is ok because we are mearly licencing the software that runs it.

 

[HaraDaya]

How about people who unknowingly bought a pre-owned game? See I was in GameStop, and saw S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat on sale (nothing about pre-owned, and stacked with presumably new copies of other games), so I immediately got it because I want to support the developers. Then I got home, and opened the case, to find a label inside that had been suspiciously painted over with a marker, through it you could read a CD-key. And on the back of the booklet, someone had written the CD-key from the label by hand. What? Also noteworthy was tiny insignifigant scratches on the DVD itself, which normally shouldn't be on a fresh copy.
Gonna make a trip in there to return it and get a fresh copy. I'm not going to pay for something someone else already bought at the price of a new one. This shit will not stand. Not even gonna bother checking if the cd-key has already been registered.