Used games

[FreakofNatur]

Problem: Used Games

Issues:
-Games are costly, retailers are pushing those used copies over new copies.
-"Anti-developer" in nature as the developers don't earn any money from such a transaction
-Intellectual property laws are inadequate to deal with such sensitive issues

My view:
Developers make good games and the retailers buy them. Most developers go through distribution platforms/retailers to "sell" their games. In truth, they have already sold the game to the retailers(for physical copies) and for digital platform, they benefit the most as there is no "used games" issue to deal with.

Most PC gamers are buying their copies digitally. Physical copies are more for consoles rather than for PC games. Look at your shop shelf. How many console games: PC games do you see?

For the console, used games are a necessity. Used games introduce. Used games advertise the company. Used games help the retailer and push their profits higher, making their distribution net expand(through higher profits). It's a necessity because it does not hurt the developer per se as the game has already been paid to the developer. If there are some kickback system for developers to receive royalties(paid from the retailer, not the consumer) it will make the transaction more fair because hey, AAA-quality games and game development in general costs a lot of money and we want our developers to be better off too.

(startrant)There is no analogy to support this as this is truly unique. Imagine making an analogy for a used spear to a used car. Totally different things; unnecessary for purpose of discussion. This is the escapist forums, not publicIRC1990. Every person on here has an inclination towards games, and using analogies don't help. Do explain your point in plain words. (/endrant)

The IP laws need to act as a fallback for DEVELOPERS, not the PUBLISHERS nor the RETAILERS. However the reality of "the law" is that IP law is treated as the U.S. interpretation of the law; seeing how megaupload was in New Zealand and still got hunted down by U.S. agents. Well, no hate, but looking at the political situation of the U.S from which we are dependent on - IP laws stilted towards the "big money" due to lobbying is more than likely to occur.

For that I am truly sad.

 

[Something Amyss]

Totalbiscuit is quite the gaming industry sycophant, and his arguments are lazy. A shame he's more into histrionics than discussion.

Used games hurt the industry quite a bit, If you go into a store they try and push the used games.

Even with the "pushing" of used games, there's no evidence of any harm done. In fact, games have remained damn healthy through the rise of Gamestop (the pusher in question), and the games industry is projecting huge growth on top of their existing growth.

This isn't just limited to games, retail across the board has to act like this otherwise someone else will open up a shop next door taking slightly less profit.

Actually, gaming gets a really poor markup compared to a good chunk of the rest of the market. "anyone who has worked in retail" should know that. Retailers are treated a lot better by other industries. One of the reasons the attempt to separate the new and used market is that it's hard to run a business on the kind of markup games have. There is no real business in trying to survive on that 2% markup on games, which is why most retailers use games to get people in the stores. The loss leader method doesn't just apply to games, but games are perhaps its most stark example of how things work. And still, loss leader methods rely on having something else with a high markup to offset it.

A game store doesn't have many options to work with here. And, quite frankly, if other products were treated this way, retail shops would be a colossal failure across the board.

 

[Racecarlock]

Right, so if I can't buy used anymore, can I get a refund directly from the publisher if the game sucks?

Seriously, am I buying games or playing god damn roulette? If you're not going to let me buy used, let me get a refund. Also, put some kind of lending system in place so I can let a friend play it for a bit.

I don't have infinite money to spend on games. If I did, I wouldn't be spending it on games, I would be getting roller coasters and carnival rides for the backyard. Or at the very least getting season passes for an amusement park. But I don't have infinite money, and games, used ones especially, are cheap. And they expose me to new franchises. Bought SR1 used, SR2 new, pre ordered the third.

Sorry I'm too nervous to spend half my weekly food budget plus 10 dollars on a game that might turn out to be total shit. But you are the guys that decide to put out review embargos and advertise your game with cinematic trailers instead of actual gameplay. I'm not playing keno here, I should be able to make more reliable bets. I should have some kind of safety net.

You know what the dominant genre is on this PC by far? Freeware. Know why? No risks. The biggest cost is hard drive space that I can free up if I don't like the game.

Is it really so hard to believe that I might want more value for my money? If I spend full price on a game, I should either be able to get a full refund or sell it used to at least cover my ass a little bit. Right now it's more like I'm betting on a horse race where most of the horses have asthma. I shouldn't feel like I'm entering a casino when I'm entering a game store.

So, know what? If you're going to block used games or illegalize used games, I'm just not going to buy the games in the first place. Oh, but then you'd probably blame freeware, indie games, and flash games. Claiming that they "Ripped off your game" and then suing them for copyright infringement and then I just give up.

 

[Entitled]

You can sell books, CDs, DVDs... why not games?

For the reasons that I just described above?

I just stated, that "games" are a form of information, and the difference information and property, is about as wide as the difference between bubblegum and objectivism.


If you disagree with any of that, then actually argue with my points, why do you think that information should be similar to property, instead of just repeating the inane question that "if you can sell [x] objects, then why not [y] intangible concepts as well?"

 

[Baldr]

Can someone tell me a good reason why the developer or anyone should earn from second hand sales?
Every other industry has second hand sales, so what's so different about games?

Not in every industry, only in the ones that sell physical products. Information is not a product, it's an abstract concept with no real scarcity, but potentially infinite access for everyone.


When you download a game, you are not getting "a copy", you are getting the permission to create a copy.

We might give it a certain artificial scarcity to give some distribution monopolies to the publisher, but why these monopolies should be granted in a way to semi-accurately mimick physical property, is not self-evident.

That's not how Europe works. If I buy something, it's mine, including licences.
So whether I got a copy of the game, or a licence to use the game, i'm allowed to sell it. And information is a product, just not a physical. Everything you sell is a product or a service. Since games are obviously not a service, it's a product.

You were asking for reasons why second hand sales SHOULD be controlled. Not legal statements for why it IS conrolled.

Europe can declare information to be a sellable product, and that won't make it so any more than if they would declare "faith in humanity" to be a sellable product, or the wetness of the ocean to be a separately sellable content, or fire on the top of a torch to be the property of the torch's holder, that they can move to another one's torch exactly once.

Information is different from property. Fundamentally. In it's very nature, it's something else. Products are defined by being physical.

When you have a milkshake, you can point at something and say "this is the milkshake".

When you have a story, there is nothing to point at, because "the story" doesn't even equal any of the copies that are made about it, but the very act of ideas and knowledge getting arranged in a particular pattern.

Intellectual property is different from the form the property is contained in, though.

If I buy a book, I have absolutely no ownership over the words within that book, and that is completely fair and how it should be. I have no ownership over that story. Can I still give that book to a friend for free? Yes. I absolutely can, because I own that book. I can absolutely sell that book and the information contained within. I cannot take that information out of the book and create a copy by myself and then sell that copy because that infringes copyright laws.

Why should games be any different?

If I have a disc with game information on it, that's no different from a book. The information the disc allows you to access is contained within that disc. It physically exists within that copy. That data is completely real. I can point at that disc or point at the file on my hard-drive and say, "This is the game." So why are games any different from a book?

I am totally within my rights to sell a copy of a game that I possess to someone else. I am not creating any additional copies of that game. I am not depriving the game company of a sale. I am simply disposing of my purchase to someone else. I no longer have any ownership of the game. I no longer have a copy. I have given my license to that service to someone else while depriving myself of the ability to play that game. Nothing has been lost to the game company.

Seriously, do you have to pay the author of a book every time you borrow a book from a library and read it? No, you don't, because that would be totally asinine and stupid. Intellectual property doesn't trump actual property rights.

A physical book is just that. It doesn't have to be supported by publisher once it leaves the shelf. Is there a typo? Can't fix that. There are no recalls. You see what you get. A game is not a physical entity per say. You can't tell what is in a game by looking at the disk. It has to be supported. Does it have multiplayer? The developers have to support servers too. It is a product and a service rolled into one.

But you can still pay for that service separately. In a lot of online games, you do pay for server support and the like. You still have to subscribe to use that game and access those servers. So the new owner does pay the companies in those cases.

Besides, if someone transfers a copy of a game to me, they have given up their right to access those services. They revoked their license to access those services and transferred it to me. If the game involves a subscription fee, I now pay that fee. If it doesn't require a subscription fee, then they haven't lost any money, because they weren't charging the original person either. The game companies are not providing an additional service to a new person who they were not providing those services to before. They are providing those services to the exact same number of people. Nothing has been lost.

Additionally, a whole ton of games aren't online or have no real need to be supported online. A lot of people never hook their consoles up to the internet. They never take advantage of those services. Should they still have to pay the game company for a used game?

Project $10 and the other pay for multiplayer was about that, if you bought a used game, then it would cost $10 for people to play multiplayer, while people who bought the game new got multiplayer free. It covered the service cost. And everyone complained and fought against that. I have no problems with used games. I have problems with the retailers, as long as they are out to undercut gamemakers, then I will not support used game sales.

 

[Baldr]

They are undercutting new game sales, for a matter of $1-$2. So instead of selling 2 or 3 games, they are selling 1 game to 2-3 people for that $1-$2 the customer saves, the publisher loses $8-$10. That adds up over thousands of sales. It is not economically helpful to anyone. Game develop lose money on projects and things that would be beneficial to players. Games would be cheaper. If you clearly don't see this, then there is something wrong.

But The publishers will not lower their prizes.... Why should they when they can get away with selling games for 60dollars? Don't come here and say that the publishers are some good guys that are looking after us. They are out to make money, they will make the most money if they sell their games for 60 dollars so they will keep selling games for 60 dollars

The publishers can't lower their prices. The retailers will undercut any sales price with a used copy. That point becomes economically beneficial at that point to keep the higher price. The reason the games stay at $60 is exactly because of the used games. Used games don't allow new games to depreciate in value.

 

[Baldr]

They are undercutting new game sales, for a matter of $1-$2. So instead of selling 2 or 3 games, they are selling 1 game to 2-3 people for that $1-$2 the customer saves, the publisher loses $8-$10. That adds up over thousands of sales. It is not economically helpful to anyone. Game develop lose money on projects and things that would be beneficial to players. Games would be cheaper. If you clearly don't see this, then there is something wrong.

But The publishers will not lower their prizes.... Why should they when they can get away with selling games for 60dollars? Don't come here and say that the publishers are some good guys that are looking after us. They are out to make money, they will make the most money if they sell their games for 60 dollars so they will keep selling games for 60 dollars

The publishers can't lower their prices. The retailers will undercut any sales price with a used copy. That point becomes economically beneficial at that point to keep the higher price. The reason the games stay at $60 is exactly because of the used games. Used games don't allow new games to depreciate in value.

If used games vanish, the publisher isn't just going to lower the prices out of the kindness of their heart. Without competition, there's zero reason to lower them. In fact, since players have no choice anymore, there's every reason to raise the prices, since there is no where else to buy them. You pay what they want, or you don't play at all. This is called a monopoly.

That is not true at all. Steam is good example of publishers lowering prices on games.

 

[Gameguy20100]

I will say it plainly used are not my problem because I don't care about them anymore.

but I will say this if you buy used because you cannot afford new games go ahead buy away you wont hear any complaints from me.

If you buy used to just spite the publisher then you're a prick.

my opinions end there.

 

[Entitled]

A CD, a DVD, and a Video Game are all the exact same thing: data encoded on a disk. They are all virtual information digitally coded. So why are video games the exception?

Books as physical objects don't need to be extensively regulated either, because they are actual scarce products to begin with. But the information in an e-book is not scarce in any way, it's noting like a book.

It's the same with movies and every other medium.

A CD, or a DVD, is an object.

"A video game" is the very idea of information being arranged in a certain way.

A copy of a game can be STORED on a DVD, that makes it easier to pretend that the game itself is the object, but once you have digital downloading, and installations, and simple data copying, the difference is becoming evident.

A disc with Bioshock on it, is an object that can be produced, sold, lost, or broken. But Bioshock itself is not an object, what we call "having the Bioshock game", just means "being in the state of knowing how to write your own data in a way to form Bioshock".

 

[Entitled]

That still makes zero sense.

A video game is also an "object"

A DVD and a CD is information arranged in a certain way to show a movie or play a song. Zero difference between that and a game. Music and movies can be copied just as easily as a game can, if not easier.

You can buy a Metallica CD new at Target, used through Amazon, or get it digitally from iTunes. You can buy The Avengers at Wal-Mart, buy it used off Craigslist, or buy it digitally through MovieSource. You can buy Bioshock at K-Mart, used through GameStop, or digitally through Steam. So why is the game the only one that a used market is destroying?

Oh, I see where we are misunderstanding each other.

When you said "CDs and DVDs vs. video games,", I assumed that you first meant video games on physical media, opposed to "just video games", that is, digitally downloaded games without any such connection.

Apparently, by "CDs and DVDs" you meant different entertainment mediums, music and films, regardless of whether they are digital or physical.

In that case, you are simply demonstratably wrong:

iTunes EULA: "You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Licensed Application." [http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/appstore/dev/stdeula/]

Used E-book for sale? Not so fast! [http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-used-ebooks-for-sale-not-so-fast-20130506,0,4877808.story]

Other digital sellers are closing in on used sales just as much as the gaming industry.

I'm not saying that games are special compared to other media, I'm saying that all digital media is different compared to objects. Games are an abstract concept, but so are songs and movies, once you remove the vessel and start selling access to raw information itself, directly.

 

[Cyfu]

They are undercutting new game sales, for a matter of $1-$2. So instead of selling 2 or 3 games, they are selling 1 game to 2-3 people for that $1-$2 the customer saves, the publisher loses $8-$10. That adds up over thousands of sales. It is not economically helpful to anyone. Game develop lose money on projects and things that would be beneficial to players. Games would be cheaper. If you clearly don't see this, then there is something wrong.

But The publishers will not lower their prizes.... Why should they when they can get away with selling games for 60dollars? Don't come here and say that the publishers are some good guys that are looking after us. They are out to make money, they will make the most money if they sell their games for 60 dollars so they will keep selling games for 60 dollars

The publishers can't lower their prices. The retailers will undercut any sales price with a used copy. That point becomes economically beneficial at that point to keep the higher price. The reason the games stay at $60 is exactly because of the used games. Used games don't allow new games to depreciate in value.

Sorry, been away for a while.

1. How do you know that games cost $60 because of used games? It might be true but I won't believe it until I see the proof.
2. And this is just speculation. If publishers got rid of used games all together I don't think they'll lower the prices. Why should they? everyone has gotten used to games costing $60 so why bother?