Books, do i buy a license to read it once, would i accept a cheaper price if i could only read the book once.
Bicycle, do i accept a cheaper bicycle if i weren't allowed to let anyone else ride it.
Cars, same thing.
Clothes, we have clothes that have been worn by up to 4 babies, we are killing the baby clothes industry, they should be limited to one baby only?
All those items break down during use and require maintance .
A book's binding will break , pages will rip and so on
A digital book can't allways be shared unless you give someone else your e-reader and so on
Cars are the same thing. Oil changes , brakes , tires /rotation , gas , air filters , belts and so on and so forth all require more money going to the manufacturer or sub companys to support.
Clothes also become useless as time goes on. Yes an infinite number of babys can wear clothes but clothes start to fade / tear as they are washed and worn more and more. Then there are stains and other things that will prevent u from using them for multiple children.
A plastic disc is really hard to destroy through normal wear and tear. A digital download doesn't break down or wear away. You just keep downloading it till its offered no longer.
Anywhere else but games we would find these conditions to be stupid and unacceptable.
And what if they made the disc really brittle so that after so many plays you have to take it in to get it resurfaced. Same with the disc drive , after say 20 games you need to take it in to be oiled up and have the lense changed. That would put it more in line with your examples
The problem with games is that they are expensive, provide very little hourly value (they are short) unless they have a multiplayer aspect that makes people buy them. Loose essentially no value (doesn't show wear) except for online passes. They have a very short lifespan at full price and is simply abandoned when released.
This is true . So we come to a point , do we accept online passes and more and more nickel and diming us or do we let to used game market go away and see if we can't reduce the nickel and diming .
On the pc I've been paying less per game than at any point in my game playing history (which started at 8 and i'm now 31) . Lack of used games did not send pc gaming prices out of control
Imagine other products where there is no spares left after 6 months (patches to fix problems) the complete engineering team being fired after producing a car leaving no one left to care for the customers. How come we the customers are supposed to suffer for this when we buy just one certain product.
Why would customers continue to support the dev and publishers if that is the case ? If everyone buys cod 1 and it sucks and is broken and they rush out and buy cod 2 and its the same thing , they can only blame themselves.
If anything the used game market rewards this behavior cause they will buy the game play it for a bit and sell it to buy the next broken game and so on and so forth all the while bleeding money for broken games.
If games become less front loaded in revenue due to people buying them as they drop in price (no secondary market eating up profits at each lower price point) then game companies will have more incentive to continue to support the game to get a longer tail of profits . WIth no used games developers could continue making money all the way down to $10 games or even $1 games when they reach a point way down their life line. Just look at steam sales.
A lot of people make fun of Dyack but he was right . Games should be developed before they are even announced and when announced and shown the first time they should be feature complete and finished and they should then go through a bug test phase before release 6 months to a year down the line. It would prevent broken games from coming out
I will say it again, it's up to the game companies to solve the problem, yes, one way is locking down used games. In a way completely viable but then they should call it "rent a game", buy gamestop and rent out games, or do it via Digital Services. They could provide games that everyone else could buy at $1000 a pop. As long as they don't claim to be selling anything to me it's ok. But with the cunning plan we are discussing, they would rent you a game for $40.
Why ? The way steam works is fine. You release a game at X price point , recoup profits from it , as sales slow down you drop to Y price point and rinse and repeat. Unlike now there will be higher demand at each price drop due to no secondary market eroding the demand at the price point.
Right now if a game launches at $60 bucks and a used $50 copy appears a week later that used market will reduce the amount of sales the company will get when they drop to $50 bucks. When they drop to $50 the used game drops to $40 and those $40 sales are reduced for the new copy and so on and so forth.
Of course i would stay away from those games and platforms and go wherever i was accepted as a customer and not a tool to provide $ to a sick industry. I think the industry needs a real good kick in the balls, start to think games differently, (here i go on repeat, sorry) provide value OVER TIME, why not use the DLC's that they develop , or pull out of the game content, as a way to keep the game alive. Release it FOR FREE over time instead of milking the cow. Spend 80% of the budget on the game, and 20% on keeping it fresh.
Cause its not free to develop content ? Because you have the secondary market eating into sales all the while ? Right now if they do what you say the secondary market will stay alive and well and feed off the new content.
Anything resembling DRM that kills games over time when servers are dead or have moved on should be boycotted by every gamer in the world, real of non real gamer. And we should spread that message wherever we go.
Why ? I bought plenty of Nintendo games fully knowing that at some point in the future there wont be Nintendo's left to play it on.
I've done the same will all systems including the xbox 360 and ps3. The death of the server is the same thing as the death of the hardware platform. As long as it doesn't happen when the sequel comes out but instead at 5 or 10 years later I'm fine with it. Even better some companys will just patch the drm out.
