This is only the latest report. Publishers have been trying to figure out a way to make money off used game sales for a while now. EA also took this tactic with their sports games and only made roster updates available for new copies of the game. No voucher, no roster updates, unless you paid EA money to get access to the updates.
Why do video game publishers feel they are entitled to additional revenue after the first sale when that's not the case for other industries? Movie and music companies aren't getting a cut on used sales. I'm pretty sure Nike isn't getting any extra money from the shirt I gave to Goodwill.
Let me quote you something from the Wikipedia article on first-sale doctrine:
The first-sale doctrine is a limitation on copyright that was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908 (see Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus) and subsequently codified in the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 109. The doctrine allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been obtained. This means that the copyright holder's rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy end once that copy is sold, as long as no additional copies are made. This doctrine is also referred to as the "first sale rule" or "exhaustion rule."Game publishers are obviously fighting this, but they don't have my support. Some are rationalizing it as digital rights management (DRM), as in Sony's SOCOM case, but the $20 charge reeks of money grubbing, not piracy prevention. Punishing the honest consumer for the action of pirates is wrong. I don't have the answer for illegally downloaded games, but it's not to charge every new user of a legitimate game an extra fee.
We all know where this is headed, digital distribution. The publishers want to cut out Gamestop and the used game sales, as well as keep a tighter grip over legit copies. Ubisoft has gone so far as to make Assassin's Creed II (PC) unplayable without an internet connection, a constant connection. As in, it will actually boot you out of the game if it detects network loss. Then what do we get for our troubles? We get no physical copies of games, manuals, and boxes. We get the inability to loan games to friends, rent them from the store, or sell them when we are done. And, if there's no plan for the publisher going out of business, possibly the loss of the game forever. Sign me up! </sarcasm>
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This is a bit of a tanget, but to the point of your post, you make an interesting comment in your last paragraph, about digital distribution. I think this is where everything "should" go.
ReplyDeleteYes. Trading will be more difficult, but in the end, competitive companies of all digital markets will find compromises to trading/sharing games, movies, applications, etc., and perhaps make things cheaper?
In my humble opinion, the concept of being completely in "the cloud," i.e. mail, pictures, newspapers, etc, will be what motivates people to no longer need "physical" ownership. They will more likely prefer to access their digital content from various devices, over physically having it in their home, office, etc.
One of the criticisms of the iPad, for instance, is that it does not have all the peripheral device connections of a tablet or netbook computer, like USB, CDROM, etc. But this device is the "beginning" of people thinking about maintaining their information, like documents, pictures, movies, etc, in the cloud. In this case, the Apple cloud (MobileMe).
Nicolas Carr's book, The Big Switch, discussed the possibility of an iPad type computer, back in 2008: http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/
He also writes an "I told ya so" article about the iPad in his blog: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_ipads_lofty.php
Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
ReplyDeleteI'm not buying it. The publishers need to prove to me that they can make digital distribution worth my while. First and foremost that means cutting the cost of their wares.
ReplyDeleteYou took a leap there by saying, "...but in the end, competitive companies of all digital markets will find compromises to trading/sharing games, movies, applications, etc., and perhaps make things cheaper?" Perhaps? They aren't showing me they are capable of lowering prices yet, when we all know they are avoiding the costs of packaging, manufacturing, media, printing, and the cost of dealing with a brick and mortar store front.
Even then, I'm not sure cheaper cost is enough to offset the rights of ownership (the trading, lending, and re-selling). The perks of digital distribution would have to be substantial. I see no signs of that. Re-relating this sub-topic back to the main point of this post (first-sale), you can see these companies are driven by greed not our best interests.
Stolen from NeoGAF since I don't see any "real" sources:
ReplyDeleteWhat is the profit margin for video games?
Costs:
Developer - $15
Publisher - $20
Licensing - $10
Retailer - $12
Manufacturing & Distribution - $3
Royalties - ?
So at the very least are we going to see the $3 go away? How about just $1 for the box/cd case?
No? B-b-but savings passed onto us!
I'm shocked that people accept the new push that they don't "own what they pay for." Amazon has revoked books... If you have any form of DRM and the DRM licensing server goes away you are screwed. It's happened plenty of times before but for a lot of people until it happens to them they are oblivous to the fact.
I don't exactly live in the now. I want to be able to play games old games in the future. I tend to wait until prices go way down. Will that option disappear with digital distribution? If the boxes aren't taking up valuable store space then there's no incentive to mark the prices down. Online competition works because they have warehouses with valuable space as well. If all "digital" content has no physical bounds to it, be prepared to pay $60 forever and probably a whole lot more since you have zero alternative.
Agreed ... What happens to my game when the company goes belly up? I want to be able to go into my library and pull out a game from back in the day and play it.
ReplyDeleteTo Dirk's and Andrew's point, we do that today with music.
ReplyDeleteHow much of my music is digital, which I can backup and play on any MP3 device I wish?
I don't have CD cases or CDROMs for my music anymore, and in another 20 years, neither will most of our games and movies.
To Travis' point, I don't know that Sony's "voucher" move will garner a large used game, online base, but in the end, those companies/publishers with the best deals is where the market will go.
Now, if only we can get to the chicks in tight leather jumpsuits, like the 80's Buck Roger's show promised us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4szGxaKF8Qw
As for music, I pay $15 a month to listen to unlimited amounts of music (as well as get nearly a full CD's worth of tracks to own). That would have bought me a single CD and that would have been all the new music I could have for $15 in one month.
ReplyDeleteThat's incentive. I'm not close minded on the subject, but I don't see any video game publishers promising anything in return for what they want to take away.
Yeah, that's why I wanted to make sure that I didn't go too far off on the tangent, with my original post.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, on respective publisher tactics to get into the used game market, and I think the market will determine whether they will continue along those lines and/or if other publishers will follow suit.
But as cloud computing technologies become more prevalent, which they currently are not, i.e. iPad, I think that more markets will move to give consumers more incentives for the digital media.