Used Games v. Piracy

[Frost27]

I know the used car analogy is used all the time, but it still stands.

No, it doesn't.

Companies should reward players for buying new, not punish them for buying used.

What's the difference ? I'll tell you what : the terminology you use when looking from a different vantage point and nothing else.
Rewarding person A for event X which is mutually exclusive with event Y means you ARE punishing person B for doing Y.
In this case, X is "buy new" and Y is "buy used".

How exactly do you propose game makers should reward those that "buy new" in a way that NOBODY would feel it "punishes used game buyers" ?
I'm really curious what you could possibly come up with.

The car analogy is always used in regards of selling owned property, not piracy so it absolutely stands up.
Would you actually feel like you stole from Logitech if you were to sell your speakers?

If Ford decided that the air conditioning and cruise control wouldn't work second hand unless you paid 300$ people would be pissed.
Getting an extended warranty for buying a new car is a reward, You don't deserve free oil changes, but you'll notice a lot of people buy new cars for the warranty because they don't want to piss around with repairs.
And hell, most car companies are good enough to transfer the warranty to the next owner!

Used car analogies do not stand at all.

Does Ford pay for the air conditioner or the brakes everytime they are used? NO.

Do game companies pay for servers and bandwidth everytime a player plays online? YES.

Thats where the analogy breaks. Warranties are a completly different issue bearing no relavance.

Yes, game companies pay for servers and bandwidth, the cost of which is factored in what they need to break even with sales figures.

If Battlefield 3 needs to sell 3 million units to be profitable enough for here to be a Battlefield 4 and they sell that many, how, pray tell is EA/Dic effected if 500,000 of that 3 million get resold to others? The important word there is REsold. They got their asking price. Not a single one of those 3 million people is going to pay a dime after purchase to help maintain those MP servers. They are already paid for, as I said above, as part of the initial overhead. Also, same number of copies equals the same amount of server load since he used copy is already accounted for.

And used cars work beautifully, as do houses, boats, etc. Name another market where the original manufacturer gets a cut when an already purchased product switches end users.

 

[vxicepickxv]

But why do game companies have to always equate game pirates with used game buyers? When will they see that the first step towards a more approachable clientele, from a marketing standpoint, is to stop treating their paying customers like criminals?

People who buy games used aren't paying customers (since none of the money from a used sale goes to the dev), so it works out all right.

Except they have the capability of purchasing DLC, which means they're not all worthless.

 

[Frost27]

Why their equal in the eyes of the creators etc: because whether you buy used or pirate it the creators get no money for it.

An Actual difference: nobody gets money for piracy but when its bought used it is noticed by the game store which influences what games they buy in the future as stock for example if they do well on pre owned games with input or involvement from a company like Deep silver the store thinks something along the lines of " most of our money is from pre-owned sales, the best sellers for the pre-owned chart all have been produced by deep silver, therefore any games by deep silver must be good and good games sell well if they become pre-owned."

They aren't equal in the eyes of the creators, nor in reality. In reality that used copy got bought and paid for, full price, by someone else. They got their $60 for that disc. After that sale they don't give a hoot in hell whether you play it or smash it with a hammer. The point is, they are trying to capitalize on a secondary market for extra income.

Pirates get prosecuted, resales get set up for extra revenue potential. Not equal in their eyes at all. Keep in mind that the big point a lot of people ar missing is: The game companies are not trying to stop the sale of preowned games, they are trying to capitalize on it.

 

[Irony's Acolyte]

I hate how people always state how game developers never see a penny off of a used games sale. What if they did? They get paid twice for the same copy of the game? Remember, for a game to be used, someone has to have already bought it. Which means they already got paid for that copy. I understand that the person is buying a used copy over a new copy which is money not going into the developers pockets (though I think it's stupid that they're fretting over 'theoretical' sales), but the person still bought the game. Which means they're willing to acquire it through legal means, rather than pirating. They're likely to buy DLC or the next game in the series if they like the game enough.

I'm not saying that game developers can't encourage people to buy their games new. Putting in free DLC with a new copy is a great tactic and I don't see any problem with. But I don't like how they're punishing people who aren't always buying the game new.

 

[JET1971]

I know the used car analogy is used all the time, but it still stands.

No, it doesn't.

Companies should reward players for buying new, not punish them for buying used.

What's the difference ? I'll tell you what : the terminology you use when looking from a different vantage point and nothing else.
Rewarding person A for event X which is mutually exclusive with event Y means you ARE punishing person B for doing Y.
In this case, X is "buy new" and Y is "buy used".

How exactly do you propose game makers should reward those that "buy new" in a way that NOBODY would feel it "punishes used game buyers" ?
I'm really curious what you could possibly come up with.

The car analogy is always used in regards of selling owned property, not piracy so it absolutely stands up.
Would you actually feel like you stole from Logitech if you were to sell your speakers?

If Ford decided that the air conditioning and cruise control wouldn't work second hand unless you paid 300$ people would be pissed.
Getting an extended warranty for buying a new car is a reward, You don't deserve free oil changes, but you'll notice a lot of people buy new cars for the warranty because they don't want to piss around with repairs.
And hell, most car companies are good enough to transfer the warranty to the next owner!

Used car analogies do not stand at all.

Does Ford pay for the air conditioner or the brakes everytime they are used? NO.

Do game companies pay for servers and bandwidth everytime a player plays online? YES.

Thats where the analogy breaks. Warranties are a completly different issue bearing no relavance.

Yes, game companies pay for servers and bandwidth, the cost of which is factored in what they need to break even with sales figures.

If Battlefield 3 needs to sell 3 million units to be profitable enough for here to be a Battlefield 4 and they sell that many, how, pray tell is EA/Dic effected if 500,000 of that 3 million get resold to others? The important word there is REsold. They got their asking price. Not a single one of those 3 million people is going to pay a dime after purchase to help maintain those MP servers. They are already paid for, as I said above, as part of the initial overhead. Also, same number of copies equals the same amount of server load since he used copy is already accounted for.

And used cars work beautifully, as do houses, boats, etc. Name another market where the original manufacturer gets a cut when an already purchased product switches end users.

Other markets such as houses, cars, boats, etc. do not have a service that the manufacturer pays for such as an online game does. Think about it, once those are sold they dont pay anything at all to the customer because they do not provide anything. It is a bullshit comparison.

Once the original buyer of the game stops playing online there is less bandwidth, less servers needed. less server maintanence. That is figured in the price of the game that they would be able to reduce spending at a ceartain time. a used game sale means the original buyer has stopped playing but now the next one takes up the use. thus they cannot drop servers, bandwidth does not decrease, they still need the same maintanence. Thus extending the time before they can reduce spending. That is what I would call a loss. I have no idea how you can consider that not to be.

If the game is SP only then they have no reason to charge something extra. I do not argue that at all. I argue that if it has online sevices then those online services should only be available to the original buyer from an economic standpoint of the company who projects that over time a certain number of original buyers will not be using the service anymore.

When you buy a Chevy or Caddilac you get 1 year of OnStar for free. If you sell that car before the year is up the new buyer does not get OnStar for free. After 1 year OnStar is paid for by the customer via a subscription. Would you rather game companies acted more like car compamnies?

 

[JET1971]

snip

I Do not argue the analogy doesnt work for SP games because it does. I did say online.

 

[Spoon E11]

Please not another one of these threads. Yeah they both hurt devs. One is legal one is not. And anyway the Escapist remains firm on its piracy rules so you have to support used games anyway.

 

[lockeslylcrit]

Playing Devil's Advocate here...

Brick and mortar stores need to survive too. I, personally, wholeheartedly support Project 10 Dollar, simply because it is a good common-ground between used game sales and new game sales without the hassle. Usually, a recently-released used game will sell for more or less ten dollars less than a new game, so if a gamer buys a used game and wants to unlock its full potential, they can pay that extra something and still get the same value (more or less) than a new game, especially if you use a rewards card.
While the publishers wont get the full value of the money back, they will get at least something. Actually, they get more than that considering that for a game to be considered used, it has to be purchased new first. That's full payment to the publisher. Take a game like Mass Effect 2, for example. If someone buys it new, that's money to the publisher and the game store (remember, retailers buy wholesale so they can profit), then the game is traded in and bought used along with access to the Cerberus Network. Again, that's money for the retailer and the publisher. If it's traded in and sold used to a gamer who buys the Cerberus Network code once again, then it's all gravy again. In a sense, EA is getting MORE money from the sale of a single new game with Project 10 Dollar than it would selling a new game without it.

I firmly believe that publishers should not shy away from used game sales and make the sales of such seem like piracy, but rather embrace used games the same way Project 10 Dollar has.

Also, ever wonder why stores like GameStop have a very tiny section on PC games but the vast majority of their stock are console games? It's because PC games are not as profitable as console games to them. The simple reason is because you cant trade in PC games or buy them used. Even with the rise of digital distribution, gamers have the convenience and reliability of just buying and downloading from Steam, Impulse, or whichever DD platform suits their fancy. Despite GameStop buying out Impulse, Steam and Amazon are much more popular choices for gamers to get quick purchases with.

 

[Frost27]

Other markets such as houses, cars, boats, etc. do not have a service that the manufacturer pays for such as an online game does. Think about it, once those are sold they dont pay anything at all to the customer because they do not provide anything. It is a bullshit comparison.

Once the original buyer of the game stops playing online there is less bandwidth, less servers needed. less server maintanence. That is figured in the price of the game that they would be able to reduce spending at a ceartain time. a used game sale means the original buyer has stopped playing but now the next one takes up the use. thus they cannot drop servers, bandwidth does not decrease, they still need the same maintanence. Thus extending the time before they can reduce spending. That is what I would call a loss. I have no idea how you can consider that not to be.

If the game is SP only then they have no reason to charge something extra. I do not argue that at all. I argue that if it has online sevices then those online services should only be available to the original buyer from an economic standpoint of the company who projects that over time a certain number of original buyers will not be using the service anymore.

When you buy a Chevy or Caddilac you get 1 year of OnStar for free. If you sell that car before the year is up the new buyer does not get OnStar for free. After 1 year OnStar is paid for by the customer via a subscription. Would you rather game companies acted more like car compamnies?

Onstar is an entirely separate company from the auto manufacturer. The service is there free for a year thanks to contracts with the auto maker to help get their product out there. It's the same way with XM radio providers. The closest video game analogy would be if a game came with a free year of XBLA or PS Plus. In hat case, just like with onstar in a car, the account with the provider of said bonus service is set up by the end user post sale and the account belongs to the user, not the car. That doesn't work.

EDIT: A house may not have a continual multiplayer service, but what it does have is a contractor who pays roofers, plumbers, framers, masons, electricians and so on and so forth when he builds that house, stuff he collects a contracted fee for when the house sells. Well, when the first owner moves and sells the house, how much does he contractor get from the same sale? Nothing, it's no longer his house and he already got his asking price.

I'm not sure I'm getting where you are coming from with the multiplayer server thing. A game developer has absolutely no idea when a copy of their game gets sold to a new owner. They do not decrease their server capability based on some arbitrary number of copies of the game that are likely not currently in use.

By your rationale, because I bought Arkham Asylum, Mass Effect 2, Prototype, and Borderlands and stopped playing Bad Company 2 while I was beating the new ones, I have somehow cost EA Dice money and am now no different than someone who buys the game used? If that's the case, how are all those poor development studios going to survive the upcoming fall release schedule? Whether I sell a game I no longer play to someone that will or I stop playing the game for a couple of months, it has precisely the same effect on the multiplayer and financial income of the game's maker. They got one payment for one disc containing that individual copy of the game, just what they asked for and since I already have all the DLC, they get a bonus when the new owner buys it.

In fact, I bet if you looked at sales figures for all of th Call of Duty, Battlefield, Red Dead, Mass Effect, etc. I can almost guarantee they have sold quite a few more copies of the DLC than copies of the game, all thanks to resale. In essence if 2 million copies sold and 3 million DLC got downloaded, resale did them a favor and they didn't lose a dollar of what they made in overall sales.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Other markets such as houses, cars, boats, etc. do not have a service that the manufacturer pays for such as an online game does. Think about it, once those are sold they dont pay anything at all to the customer because they do not provide anything. It is a bullshit comparison.

Once the original buyer of the game stops playing online there is less bandwidth, less servers needed. less server maintanence. That is figured in the price of the game that they would be able to reduce spending at a ceartain time. a used game sale means the original buyer has stopped playing but now the next one takes up the use. thus they cannot drop servers, bandwidth does not decrease, they still need the same maintanence. Thus extending the time before they can reduce spending. That is what I would call a loss. I have no idea how you can consider that not to be.

If the game is SP only then they have no reason to charge something extra. I do not argue that at all. I argue that if it has online sevices then those online services should only be available to the original buyer from an economic standpoint of the company who projects that over time a certain number of original buyers will not be using the service anymore.

When you buy a Chevy or Caddilac you get 1 year of OnStar for free. If you sell that car before the year is up the new buyer does not get OnStar for free. After 1 year OnStar is paid for by the customer via a subscription. Would you rather game companies acted more like car compamnies?

Onstar is an entirely separate company frm the auto manufacturer. The service is there free for a year thanks to contracts with the auto maker to help get their product out there. It's the same way with XM radio providers. He closest video game analogy would be if a game came with a free year of XBLA or PS Plus. In hat case, just like with onstar in a car, the account with the provider of said bonus service is set up by he end user post sale and the account belongs to the user, not the car. That doesn't work.

I'm not sure I'm getting where you are coming from with the multiplayer server thing either. A game developer has absolutely no idea when a copy of their game gets sold to a new owner. They do not decrease their server capability based on some arbitrary number of copies of the game that are likely not currently in use.

By your rationale, because I bought Arkham Asylum, Mass Effect 2, Prototype, and Borderlands and stopped playing Bad Company 2 while I was beating the new ones, I have somehow cost EA Dice money and am now no different than someone who buys the game used? If that's the case, how are all those poor development studios going to survive the upcoming fall release schedule? Whether I sell a game I no longer play to someone that will or I stop playing the game for a couple of months, it has precisely the same effect on the multiplayer and financial income of the game's maker. They got one payment for one disc containing that individual copy of the game, just what they asked for and since I already have all the DLC, they get a bonus when the new owner buys it.

In fact, I bet if you looked at sales figures for all of th Call of Duty, Battlefield, Red Dead, Mass Effect, etc. I can almost guarantee they have sold quite a few more copies of the DLC than copies of the game, all thanks to resale. In essence if 2 million copies sold and 3 million DLC got downloaded, resale did them a favor and they didn't lose a dollar of what they made in overall sales.

In addition to this, server upkeep is minimal. With peer to peer hosting like the consoles use, all that is necessary is a small server to keep track of player's stats. The users do all of the heavy lifting themselves. With dedicated servers, generally speaking the company doesn't host anything, since it's all hosted by users who run their own servers. Now, these users generally ask for donations from their regulars, but that's completely separate from the cost of the game, and the publishers don't have anything to do with it.

 

[Krinku]

It's all about profit. If they can milk some more money out of a game, they will.

 

[Distance_warrior]

This seems like game publishers need to adjust their business model. How bout this. All companies get together and by a retail franchise then only release games to that franchise or if that's illegal just make your deals slightly better than your competitors.

Of course this probably wont work because of some legal gibber jabber but think out side the god-damn box publishers there are other solutions. You know something like giving your customers better deals if they trade in and buy used games from you at a lower price than the retailers could match.

Edit: yeah I know these probably wont work but my point remains the same, think of a better solution omitting content isn't the only way.

 

[Vibhor]

I cannot think of any game with true artistic merit, but I do see alot of craft in games and that is valuable also, if not moreso.

Think of it this way then, when the game you play makes the publishers enough profit, the game developers get to keep their shitty jobs.

Shadow of the colossus.
BAM! Your mind = Blown

It's a pretty game, but that doesn't make it fine art.
Games shouldn't aspire to become art anyway. Entertainment is more than good enough.

Really? The story, the visuals, the setup all fit so perfectly. Its like playing a Shakespeare novel but that comparison really makes the game look bad.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I cannot think of any game with true artistic merit, but I do see alot of craft in games and that is valuable also, if not moreso.

Think of it this way then, when the game you play makes the publishers enough profit, the game developers get to keep their shitty jobs.

Shadow of the colossus.
BAM! Your mind = Blown

It's a pretty game, but that doesn't make it fine art.
Games shouldn't aspire to become art anyway. Entertainment is more than good enough.

Really? The story, the visuals, the setup all fit so perfectly. Its like playing a Shakespeare novel but that comparison really makes the game look bad.

You do realize that Shakespeare never wrote a novel, right? He wrote a lot of plays and sonnets, but no novels.

 

[Vibhor]

I cannot think of any game with true artistic merit, but I do see alot of craft in games and that is valuable also, if not moreso.

Think of it this way then, when the game you play makes the publishers enough profit, the game developers get to keep their shitty jobs.

Shadow of the colossus.
BAM! Your mind = Blown

It's a pretty game, but that doesn't make it fine art.
Games shouldn't aspire to become art anyway. Entertainment is more than good enough.

Really? The story, the visuals, the setup all fit so perfectly. Its like playing a Shakespeare novel but that comparison really makes the game look bad.

You do realize that Shakespeare never wrote a novel, right? He wrote a lot of plays and sonnets, but no novels.

Oh damn, My bad.
I stand corrected, SotC is still art.

 

[magnuslion]

I am already boycotting this game. Always on drm, cutting out portions of the game, etc etc ends with the same answer from me: Fuck You. You are not getting my money for sure now. I will buy games from a company that does not act like a bunch of asshats.

 

[CM156_v1legacy]

Secondly, Gamestop bought over a billion dollars worth of used games last year. $750 Million of that by consumers went towards purchasing new games. That's right. So that money went towards publishers pockets directly.

No... $750 million went into buying other USED games from GAMESTOP. There are serious differences between buying a used game or a new game.

You complain a lot about greedy companies trying to get all your money, so instead of giving 60 dollars to the company (a percentage of which goes to the developers of the game), you chose to give 55 dollars to gamestop (which takes the entirety of your money to its vault). Then you complain when publishers use DRM, DLC or an online pass, or when studios are closed because their work undersold. But everything is fine: you get to save enough to buy a Big Mac, and its likely those poor managers on gamestop deserved your money more than Pandemic, Midway, THQ, LucasArts, Ensemble, Eidos, Junction Point or Harmonix (those bastards).

No, I spoke true when I said new sales. Look it up. I already posted a link earlier in this artilce.

Secondldy, I buy most of my games new anyways. And I detest Big Macs. I just support those who chose to use consumer rights that allow them to get rid of a product they no longer desire to keep. I've posted before, there are better ways to get people to hold onto their disks. Give them the carrot, not the stick.

And, at the end of the day, there's nothing we can legally do as gamers about used sales and Gamestop. I've just one request: Stop demonizing those who choose to buy from them. Thanks

 

[Tax_Document]

If everyone bought new, would the servers stay up forever? No? Then you entire point is meaningless. I say again, charging multiple times for a single copy of the game is a money grab.

That's actually a pretty hardcore logical fallacy. I was never implying that.

Jimmy buys a game new, plays it online for 3 and a half years then sells it because he's going off to college.

Joe Bob buys Jimmy's copy, and plays it online for 3 more years.

That's 6 and a half years of server uptime if they have a large enough fanbase to appease.

Crapsoft only projected the game would be popular for 2 years, so they budgeted that amount. They have to either eat the costs and gain the respect of over a million people, or destroy whatever shred of love their fans had for them, and close the servers. Any reasonable company would rather keep their fans, in order to sell more games later down the road.

Does that make any more sense to you? or are you going to mention how they still don't have to, even if they lose a million fans? And therefore a 500,000(if only 50% of the current fans buy used) drop in unit sales. ...Please don't start a company.

Uhh, who is telling them to keep the servers up...? The used-sale department doesn't have enough people to keep a server up for 3 years...

You're just silly.

 

[leon32]

Its really not a game companies think people who buy preowned new relases are pirates its that the stores who sell the preowned games ARE pirates im not really sure how you havnt really seen much of these things in media but the game companys second hand libraries usually sell for only slightly less than the retail price making it seem like the better choice and when someone buys that game the store itself is the only one getting any money out of it the developers publishers and everone else involved are completely cut out of the loop making it so a lot and i do mean a lot of the money those people who put so much into making those games never see a cent and while yes those with the more "piratey" sensibilities see it it as meh DRM so screw them, if you put years of work into something you honestly just wanted people to see and enjoy and maybe just maybe if you did a good job people will buy it and youll get a small cut of the money so you can keep on doing what you love; then suddenly you release a few copies to see how it goes people love it immensely and money starts to trickle in then when you release more suddenly it all just stops completely because those ones you sent out are being bought returned and resold over and over again doing nothing but making gamestop richer and richer while you cant rub two pennies together to try make that new game you wanted to

 

[ArianaUO321]

Buying a used game means you are buying a game that has already originally been bought and paid for when new. The company already earned their profit from the original sale of it. All that is happening when the game is bought used is the product is then passed around between different owners.

Piracy in a way is similar, as the original copy of the game was most likely purchased legally, but that is where the similarities end. Piracy involves making numerous copies of the game thus the copies of said game are passed to dozens or even thousands of players. That takes away potential profit for the company.

Used games aren't cloning dozens of the same game, its one copy and one copy only that is passed to a different user. The company already earned their money from the initial sale.