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http://www.xboxdailynews.com/2011/08/29/seeing-red-rage-dev-id-software-locks-down-single-player-content-for-used-buyers/



Hmmm, not sure about this. Yes, it's a good thing that they want the money they deserve for making the game.... but content? That's a slippery slope....

Oh look, another reason not to buy something from Bethesda.

lol, I have no problem with policies like this. The companies don't profit from used sales, so they have no reason to serve people who buy the game used equally compared to those who buy new.

I support this.

Maybe once Used Game sellers like gamestop start giving a cut to the developer, they will change their tune on these codes for content/multiplayer.

Life used to be so easy.

Go into Game, buy a game.
Go home load and play.
No internet thingy requiring hoops to be leapt through.

Ah happy days

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Life used to be so easy.

Go into Game, buy a game.
Go home load and play.
No internet thingy requiring hoops to be leapt through.

Ah happy days

Agreed...

No! I like my always on DRM!

On RAGE:

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Life used to be so easy.

Go into Game, buy a game.
Go home load and play.
No internet thingy requiring hoops to be leapt through.

Ah happy days

this was before gamestop and user used game retailers extracted about 3-4 billion dollars from devs/producers pockets.

How are they doing that?
Is buying a second hand car any different?
Just curious as I am well behind on these issues.

Melissia wrote:lol, I have no problem with policies like this. The companies don't profit from used sales, so they have no reason to serve people who buy the game used equally compared to those who buy new.

This. The only reason why people don't like this, or project 10 dollar, is because they're cheap.

However, it's places like Gamestop (especially when I've heard they'll buy games for a few bucks and then try to sell them at $20) who are making all that money, not the people who made the game.

That's why I always buy new.

Digital content is one area where used sales really, really hurt producers.

If I buy a used car, I get less car than if I bought it new. If I buy a used 40k army, I have to put time and effort into fixing/setting it up.

If I buy a used video game... I've got the exact video game. There's no natural depreciation that encourages new sales. Computer game makers realized long ago that they need to put enough content into a game to make people actually buy it. There's little market for "used" computer games.

It seems to me that offering more content for the people that actually pay full price is a good way to encourage people to, well, pay full price.

As they say, "you get what you pay for."

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:How are they doing that?
Is buying a second hand car any different?
Just curious as I am well behind on these issues.

If a dealership wants, it can say its warranty is non-transferable. If they provide extra features for the car such as on-star, as another example, if the contract says it's non-transferable it's generally non-transferable, as that's what you signed up for when you bought the feature on the car.

That's basically what the game devs are starting to do more and more; "the game is transferable, but this bonus feature is not".



I think I'll quote Penny Arcade here...

The idea that THQ [or Bethesda, in this case] is somehow “disrespecting customers” with this kind of rhetoric misunderstands the situation as completely as it is possible to do so. In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of theirs. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can’t figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.

I was opposed when i read it originally but after reading the arguments for it, it have to say i'm kinda siding with the Devs and such on this.

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:How are they doing that?
Is buying a second hand car any different?
Just curious as I am well behind on these issues.

Few differences. The people who makes the cars also own the dealership that sells them or is in contract with them. Games don't have that.

Cars also last a lot longer then a new game. A car will last you years where a game dosen't.

Cars also degrade over time, so a used car dosen't perform as well as a new car. A used game performs as well as a new game.

Finally cars need service. The dealership can still make money selling parts and other things.

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:How are they doing that?
Is buying a second hand car any different?
Just curious as I am well behind on these issues.

because games, unlike cars, are information not physical products that wear out.
you are purchasing an experience, its like watching a movie then walking out and selling your ticket to the next guy who goes in and sells it to the next guy, the theatre only makes the initial sale and loses a number of theoretical customers.
Add in that some people buy the game used or rent them, make a copy then return it and/or download them illegally, and you have issues.
It is /mostly/ publishers forcing DRM into games to make more money, the bigger the game is expected to be the more dev time can be justified working DRM into the system, so you see high brow games like rage and starcraft with DRM programmed into the game itself, while smaller ones or ones less likely to be pirated rely on out-of-the-box stuff like securom

Just wait, its going to keep getting worse (diablo3 requires an internet connection 100% of the time to play) until we are all using cloud computing of some sort or another. Even HUGE flops like the assassins creed thing where people who bought the game weren't able to play it for weeks aren't remembered by customers for more than 10 minutes in any meaningful way.

It /is/ kind of unfair, i'm a try-before-i-buy guy myself with some exceptions, ID and DoubleFine being two of them. And kind of a double edged sword, corps assume that games are pirated because we dont want to pay for them, when in reality its because many gamers simply cant afford all the games they want, increasing sales on something like RAGE isnt perceived as also hurting sales on other titles that are more easily pirated, which I think is why there are fewer and fewer studios and games that take risks, its just easier to pirate those games when you /have/ to buy the more mainstream ones.

Additionally, having a high resale value increases the overall value of a new car.

Meh, online activation DA: O free DLC style.

I'll still buy it, but $15 CAN or less because I consider it a rental. Two things that wave this would be co-op and being so good I'd be willing to buy it twice. I still have Icewind Dale to finish (thank you gog.com).

I know many here will not go a day without internet for most their lives, but I have and will live & work in places with little to no internet access for months to years at a time so having to go online is a big no no in most cases.

What all this DRM stuff does is drive up the console sales at the expense of PC sales, more so I imagine for kids looking to trade in games to get their next game.

Not really? There is almost no used game market for the PC. These days, developers are more worried about the lost profits from the used game market than from pirates... as that's quite a bit larger.

No, this kind of program is pretty much designed specifically for consoles in the first place. Actually given the switch to Steam and other similar services, which almost all have offline modes, PC gaming can work quite well without a net connection. With Steam, at least, you need an initial connection, then you're done and verified, you go offline and you never have to connect for that game ever again.

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Life used to be so easy.

Go into Game, buy a game.
Go home load and play.
No internet thingy requiring hoops to be leapt through.

Ah happy days

I'd take the ritualistic ceremony that was required to get my NES games to work over the current mess any day.

Melissia wrote:Not really? There is almost no used game market for the PC. These days, developers are more worried about the lost profits from the used game market than from pirates... as that's quite a bit larger.

I think its more that the used game markets people are willing to pay money for the product, where pirates are generally seen as not.

since they are willing to pay money, they want to kick the user down a flight of stairs and take it.
Its kind of like the explosion of crap MMO's when warcraft was successful, there's money to be made, GIVE IT TO US SCREW THE PLAYERS
The new black is DLC that was created before the game was released so you can charge 70, 80, 100 for a "complete" game


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Monster Rain wrote: NES

you know, my sister got one of the top-loading newer NES's and she said it resolved alot of her issues with dust.

(I also blew out the games with 80psi air, lol)

There's no effective difference, to the developer, between a used game non-customer and a pirated copy non-customer. The developer/publisher didn't get money from either one. When you buy used from Gamestop, you're Gamestop's customer, not the developer's. When you pirate, you're not the developer's customer either.

There's a slight difference, actually.

For short games with a high resale value, developers can charge a little more, and buyers know they'll get it back when they resell.

Pirates literally only buy one copy.

Melissia wrote:There's no effective difference, to the developer, between a used game non-customer and a pirated copy non-customer. The developer/publisher didn't get money from either one.

There is, the difference being that one was willing to get the game, maybe, but got it used for whatever reason, price, sales pitch, some gamestop offer, whatever.

By limiting content for 2nd hand gamers you present the user with an opportunity cost, is the ~$10 I save worth the content I'm going to miss out on?

But you're right, they are functionally the same if you look at it from a non-marketing perspective.

This is slightly different from just providing DLC to purchasing users on launch, they are just adding it on the front end instead of the back end, which is negative. instead of getting something new and exciting for buying it from XYZ , we are instead takings something away.

Buy new if you want your favorite devs to keep making games, otherwise they have no money to make games.

And the second hand market is killing console gaming, har de har har.

Thank you for the answers

TBH am not a very active (PC) gamer and have no console systems, but can appreciate the concerns that may affect the viability of the industry.
I have bought second hand games from Game for my daughter's DS, but afaik most, if not all of their re-sell stock is obtained via trade ins, so new games get sold in return.

ZatGuy wrote:And the second hand market is killing console gaming, har de har har.

Har har har will be right once all those console sales aren't propping up the developers to continue developing games on either platform; pc or console.

Without consoles, there would be no triple-A titles that we have come to expect.

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Thank you for the answers

TBH am not a very active (PC) gamer and have no console systems, but can appreciate the concerns that may affect the viability of the industry.
I have bought second hand games from Game for my daughter's DS, but afaik most, if not all of their re-sell stock is obtained via trade ins, so new games get sold in return.

See, that's actually the thing that causes the problems in the developers' eyes.

You get a lot of these single player games(The Force Unleashed, for example) where people buy them brand new at launch--and then trade them in as soon as they do one playthrough. Gamestop will pay something like $35-$40 on the title depending on how 'in demand' it is. They then resell it for $52 or $57 as "PREOWNED", and they pocket the difference entirely on their own since the developers and publishers are only paid for the original sale.

I don't think I've ever sold a game, however, I don't like the secondhand market becoming crippled in such a way. Next time you walk into a vintage game shop, Slackers or whatever equivalent you might have around and you see that Nintendo 64 hanging on the wall, and you think to yourself "$42 and I could have two controllers, Goldeneye, two 40s of malt liquor, and fun for myself and a friend for the weekend? feth yes!", imagine now if they had some way of making it so that you couldn't play multiplayer if you hadn't originally bought the game yourself? How about if Smash Bros. only limited you to half the characters unless you bought it new? "No problem," you say, "I'll just buy the new copy, or I'll just send $5 to Nintendo to have them unbreak my game for me." Oh, wait, it's 10+ years old. You can't find it new, and even if you could, how do you know that the activation server is available still to bless your copy? It's effectively bit-rot. You see this a lot in computer gaming but with hardware no longer existing to run old software.

Granted, the game companies have already made their money and made off like bandits. They might, eventually, 10 years later, re-re-release Goldeneye on the "Super Wii 64", but you don't know that they ever will. Even then, it won't be the original experience, it will be on their new custom controllers that don't have the same feel, and probably with an engine overhaul so that it has more of a 'polished' look.

This is why this is bad. This is why people need to not buy games that are defective by design. We need to send a clear and strong message that we want to be able to pick up a retro game 10 years from now and it still be as playable as the day we bought it. This is why any DRM is bad also.

And if this isn't good enough, I could also just simply retort with "used bookstores didn't kill book publishing."

daedalus wrote:I don't think I've ever sold a game, however, I don't like the secondhand market becoming crippled in such a way. Next time you walk into a vintage game shop, Slackers or whatever equivalent you might have around and you see that Nintendo 64 hanging on the wall, and you think to yourself "$42 and I could have two controllers, Goldeneye, two 40s of malt liquor, and fun for myself and a friend for the weekend? feth yes!", imagine now if they had some way of making it so that you couldn't play multiplayer if you hadn't originally bought the game yourself? How about if Smash Bros. only limited you to half the characters unless you bought it new? "No problem," you say, "I'll just buy the new copy, or I'll just send $5 to Nintendo to have them unbreak my game for me." Oh, wait, it's 10+ years old. You can't find it new, and even if you could, how do you know that the activation server is available still to bless your copy? It's effectively bit-rot. You see this a lot in computer gaming but with hardware no longer existing to run old software.

Granted, the game companies have already made their money and made off like bandits. They might, eventually, 10 years later, re-re-release Goldeneye on the "Super Wii 64", but you don't know that they ever will. Even then, it won't be the original experience, it will be on their new custom controllers that don't have the same feel, and probably with an engine overhaul so that it has more of a 'polished' look.

This is why this is bad. This is why people need to not buy games that are defective by design. We need to send a clear and strong message that we want to be able to pick up a retro game 10 years from now and it still be as playable as the day we bought it. This is why any DRM is bad also.

And if this isn't good enough, I could also just simply retort with "used bookstores didn't kill book publishing."

And game companies should care about this WHY?

Vintage video gaming earns them no money and is a niche market. Companies need to look forward NOT backward.

And again, people buying vintage games are NOT customers of these companies.

Please, give me a real reasonable and logical(ie. not emotional or nostalgic) reason why vintage game players should be considered by companies making games.