Poll: Buying Used Games is just as Bad as Pirating

[Darmort]

First and foremost, ANY luxury item industry WILL have a second hand market. Books, cars, DVDs, CDs, clothes, jewelry, etc. This is basic economics. I would like to hear one good reason why gaming should be exempt from the basic economic processes that every other market is subject to?

This.

What you've said is... it's as bad to pay money for something as it is to illegally download something. Gee, I better not buy a used car! Think of all the evil I could do with the money not going to the original creators! Oh look, a used book store! It is the devil!

 

[katsabas]

In general, I like em brand new, with the wrapping and all. But if I stumble upon a game I am not SO interested and is something new for me (like PURE, which proved to be a lot of fun even when you are losing), I will prefer the used version. Why? Cause A, PS3 titles cost a crapton and B, cause Blu Rays cannot get scratched.

 

[Signa]

Spoiler: snip

I don't understand how so many people are saying that piracy is worse than second hand sales. Is no one looking at the potential of money handed to a dev? In second hand sales, a sale of a game is 100% confirmed. A person wanted it, and that person bought it. It shouldn't matter if it's legal or if that copy was bought once before, 2 people are playing 1 copy of the game. After that second sale is confirmed, that is a solid loss of money a dev could have made if the price was right. With piracy, there is no guarantee that the pirate would have bought the game if they couldn't pirate it, nor is there a guarantee that the pirate would not have bought the game after playing it. You can guarantee that the used game customer will not be paying the dev for their fun at a later time. Ultimately, 100% of used sales are a loss to the dev while piracy can fluctuate and the definition of a loss can change drastically depending on the circumstances.

Keep in mind I'm auguring strictly from a "which is worse" line of logic. I really don't believe that all players should pay for the games they play ever just because some one else made it. I just keep seeing all these weak arguments saying that Used: 1 sale = 20 plays, Piracy: 1 sale = 2,000,000 plays, lame car analogies, and the definition of what is worse is dictated by what is legal and what is not.

Bottom line: There has been at least one person on this forum at some point in time who has admitted to piracy and then proceeded to buy the game which gave the devs money. I'd like to see the post of the person who bought a used game and then felt they needed to buy a new copy so that the devs got money too. Piracy may be more rampant and uncontrolled, but there is no way to accurately asses the actual damage it does. The same can not be said for use game sales.

*An heroes myself*

I pirated the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R., bought it because it was fucking awsome and then bought every game in the series since. With Call of Pripyat I pirated the russian version because it would take months to get to europe and I had allready pre-pruchased it, am I a evil and should burn in hell because they got 4 sales of one pirated copy of a game I would never had bought in the first place?
And thats just a few..

After reading this post, I feel saddened that I missed it before making my own post. My points stand but he managed to make the same argument I was going for without getting into the sticky tangent of the legality of the entire copyright and patent systems. In other words, he made his point without the risk of derailing the thread.

Lol thanks. I was actually sleep deprived when I wrote that, and yet now that I've woken up, I see my writing and logic was stronger than I could have done now while rested.

Even now, I see that while I got quoted 3.5 times, everyone up to your post is still focusing on the ratio of pays per plays and not the plays per sales. It makes me wonder how much your "thought police" comment is affecting everyone because we all know how devs love to cry piracy whenever they can.

 

[DracoSuave]

If the gaming companies don't want people to buy used games, they should make games people don't want to sell.

Companies that make games with small play-life that are played and then discarded have only themselves to blame when the buyer wants to get back some value for their money.

 

[dekkarax]

Not really.

The money from used games will go (most of the time) to the game retailer; what will that retail do with that cash, mostly buy new stock.

 

[Small Waves]

At last when the used copy was first purchased, the developer got money from the sale. However, by buying used games, you are supporting the store, which is better than downloading it.

 

[maninahat]

Used games are a massive scam in the UK at the moment. Buy a new game finish it return it after a week lose ten pounds of its value, the game shop charge two pounds less than a new copy this is pure profit.

It is called making a living. Used game sales wouldn't work if they bought a game off you full price and did not mark up the price. They still had to buy a game off you in the first place, so you subtract that from the price they sell your second hand games to someone else (which is less than the original highstreet price). It isn't as big a profit margin. Consider how much the original game store had to pay their suppliers to stock new titles in the first place.

Book shops will buy second hand books off you for 50p each (often less than a tenth of the original price) and sell it for a quid. The price will be higher if it is a current best seller. That's perfectly normal.

 

[maninahat]

If devs had a genuine complaint with selling of used games, they would take legal action against Amazon, Gamestop, and all the other big retailers by now.

 

[maninahat]

Piracy is bad because it's illegal.

Used Games are not illegal.

Its illegal to not own a rake in Georgia, that's bad too right.

It's illegal to kill a man in most countries, I bet that's a nonesensical law too right? [/sarcasm]. See, anyone can make stupid syllogisms if they just try.

 

[theultimateend]

Query: Do you also believe that buying a used car is the same as stealing one?

Pirating is free and detracts one sale from the Devs.

False - or at least, not always true. People could (and do) pirate games they never intended to buy in the first place, thus losing the developers nothing. Examples of this might be people with GBA/NDS emulators on the PC when they don't actually own the applicable handheld, but I would wager money that the vast number of PC gaming pirates never intended to pay for a copy in the first place.

Yeah, counting a 0 as -1 is the largest fallacy I've seen when discussing piracy.

I am sweden on the issue of piracy, I don't condemn it, but I also don't condone it.

HOWEVER I will point out that saying that someone would have bought a game they pirated is bollocks. Some things are worse betting time against but not betting money AND time. Pirates, at least the ones I've known in my life, are willing to lost 3 hours of their life to an absolutely terrible excuse for a game but are not willing to also PAY for that. They've already been punished, a punishment in spades is just extra painful.

Now not just bad games get pirated. But genuinely good games succeed almost always and when they don't I highly doubt piracy had to do with it. Obscure awesome games would have never sold well enough either way unfortunately.

Buying used, using gamefly, or pirating all result in the same end. A single copy was bought and multiple people got to play it. The way you profit with these options available is make your game worth buying.

If you find a niche that works, stick with it. I buy pokemon games every single time they come out...are they knew? Fuck no. But they give me a fun time I don't have to hedge my bets against. I know what is coming and that makes me happy.

Nippon Ichi? They tried to vary what they were doing and spread themselves too thing, ended up losing 97.5% of their marketshare.

Valve is a great example of a company who makes pretty solid stuff and doesn't implement hardcore DRM. Also don't see Blizzard (to my knowledge) shitting fire all over the place. They make sure their quality product is better than the crap you can get for free.

I like to think, and perhaps naively, that what gets you sales is quality. Everything is worth what the purchaser will pay (something I learned from a video game. Popquiz: Which game was it?). If your game is only worth the time a person spends on it they will only spend the time.

Piracy is bad because it's illegal.

Used Games are not illegal.

Its illegal to not own a rake in Georgia, that's bad too right.

It's illegal to kill a man in most countries, I bet that's a nonesensical law too right? [/sarcasm]. See, anyone can make stupid syllogisms if they just try.

Except theirs was illegal all the time and yours is only illegal in certain situations.

Killing during war is not illegal. The executor during a fatal injection is not breaking the law.

MURDER however is illegal in ALL countries. So if you ran with murder, and not killing, you might be on to something.

However, piracy is only illegal if you don't pay for your second hand copy (sounds weird but think about it. Piracy is borrowing without paying the person you borrowed from). If you pay the person who is letting you borrow it it is renting or used sales. We just really like transfer of currency in the US . It's a capitalist thing that I again, neither condemn nor promote .

 

[Ocelano]

In fact its even worse financially but better economically. [sub]I know what those words mean so I can use them.[/sub]

Pirating is free and detracts one sale from the Devs. But with used games, your money goes to someone else (which is morally the right thing.)

To say pirating is hurting the industry more than used games is to be wrong. Because the only argument against Pirating is that it hurts the industry. Otherwise you shouldn't care what people do with their lives, used games are just as bad.


Edit 1: A lot of people quoted me on different pages so I don't feel like quoting them back, that'll take too long.

The whole used vs pirate debate hinges on potential sales. Game companies will say that a pirate was a potential sale, but they won't say that a used game was a potential sale. Used games result in more money being given back to the store, while pirating games gives nothing back. That's the only upside to used games. Which does not concern game developers as much as you think.

And godammit, stop using the used car argument!

Edit 2: "Pirates don't buy new games!!1!1"
Maybe, maybe not. How do we know how many people are just poor and wouldn't have bought it anyways? With PC games I think its safe to say a good amount of people pirate because they have no other way to get games, which in the end doesn't hurt anyone.

Also, people buy used games because

a) Its not commercially available, hard to find
B) They can't afford a new copy.

Again, we don't know how many people would buy the new copy if they couldn't find it used, so there is no way to ultimately know which method (Pirating, Used) hurts the Devs more in terms of sales.

A point against which you has probably already been stated and I missed is that most pirated games are online and could result in hundreds of copies while a used game would be lucky to go through a dozen hands

Personally I mainly hit the used game shop's, JB Hifi and eb-games for the most parts because I am trying to find games that due to shoddy australian distribution have been discontinued

eg. disgaea

 

[Sparrow]

Surely DLC makes your point moot? Or am I missing something?

[sup]Please tell me I wasn't the first to pick up on this. That means either I'm smart, and you're all very stupid. Or, I'm very stupid, and you're all smart. That's bad either way.[/sup]

 

[Delock]

I'd have to disagree. First of all, the publisher has already recieved the money for that game from the distributer it sold it to, giving ownership to the distributer. The distributer exchanges this game for money of the consumer in hopes of making a profit. Now both the distributer and the publisher have gotten their money and no longer have ownership of the product. If the consumer decides to sell it, the cycle continues down. The game isn't the publishers. Money made by selling it doesn't go to them anyways. And as long as it's being sold without being copied, it's a large chain. Money is being exchanged between two people (or a person and a business) for ownership of something. Money keeps flowing and the economy keeps working.
Pirating is not giving, but still recieving. No one gets anything for the product you get, while at the same time, no money is being given to the distributer to give to the company for more games to sell or the consumer to buy more games. The game is given and the person retains all of their money. There is no flow of money meaning there is no real economy at work.

 

[Hashcurt]

Buying used games is nowhere near just as bad as pirating.

By buying a used game, are you depriving the prospective place out of revenue? no. I sometimes buy the odd used game or used hardware from time to time because it's a damn sight cheaper than paying top dollar and some of the non-chains do need your cash from time to time. Hell, bought the Warcraft 3 and it's expansion again recently from a local for the bargain price of £2.50, saving £12.50 if I went to go buy them in game.

Also, what somebody else said about finding rarity's that you've been looking for. You can't always buy them new.

 

[Antari]

Its all about the greed, they just want more money and they don't care where they get it. No one is impacting them but themselves.