Mord's Blog - Mord's Project No Dollar

RSS Bot · February 10, 2010

Just so you know where the subject is coming from, it's from here.

You know, the whole attack on the secondhand game market makes me sick.

The rabid fanbase that defends the attack as something nobel and justified also makes me sick.

It makes me violently ill whenever I see those dicks trying to rationalize it, especially when they compare buyers of secondhand games to the likes of copyright infringers. "Pirates" for those who like incorrect terminology.

Needless to say, I get sick reading Kotaku comments on any article that touches on this.

Here's my take on the situation. Individuals and companies that produce some sort of new content, regardless of type of goods, have the right of first sale. This is because they are the only ones allowed to actually create new copies. However once a particular copy is sold, and to do so this means the producing company has earned their money on the sale of that particular copy, their rights to future $$ brought in by the resale of that game IS NONEXISTANT. This is how it is suppose to work. It doesn't matter how much the game/cd/movie/microwave cost to develop. If it's costing more to develop than the profit it brings in, and you're actually trying to support a company on it, either remove the waste from the development cycle or charge enough to get by. Or learn how to do Hollywood accounting like the movie industry so you can claim you "just" break even on every game that earns you 500 million dollars profit.

So needless to say one of the reasons I hate the turn to DLC is because it's just a way to cripple said secondhand market. A way to devalue your over expensive games to anyone else even though it's still in mint condition.

Another reason I hate it is because 10-20 years down the road when the DLC is no longer hosted (See Microsoft's current decision to remove all original Xbox DLC/patches from their service) everyone will be left with defective, bug ridden discs to trade back and forth. Even if they bought it new AND paid for the DLC. Your harddrives aren't going to last forever in those consoles. It's being shown now that the DLC won't be around forever. And in some cases the game patches are borderline NECESSARY to enjoy the game. (Fable II is a good example of this apparently.)

Ugh. Making me sick even talking about this shit. I'll conclude with this. IF a publisher or developer wants extra profits from the secondhand market, they should actually PARTICIPATE in that secondhand market. (The problem of course is that THAT costs more than crippling the product and charging people to "fix" it.) There is NOTHING stopping a company from instituting their own buy-back system for their own games, even if it's just on their website. And as the original developers of the game, doing that could position them to offer more unique things for buy-backs than some discount on a future release.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?app=blog&blogid=129&showentry=6828