"Other forms of media such as film, music, and literature have various forms of public archives, so that people can continue to enjoy them long after their time has passed. Where is such an archive for gaming? Leaving it up to corporations is dangerous IMO, because games would either be lost altogether, or we would be forced to pay outrageous prices, or they'd be subject to altering, or restrictive use."
I thought of this just three evenings ago while in my local public library, looking at the books, magazines, and DVD/CDs there.
Lending libraries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lending_library), with financial obligations (private) beyond tax dollars do exist still, but are fewer today than they were hundreds of years ago. Publishing was a very expensive business before the industrial revolution.
Publishing companies, (newspapers magnates especially {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch}) hate publicly owned and tax dollar supported libraries.
There are groups currently, as the MOMA, that are looking into game preservation, in a public or University level collection. Privately held collections could become real use museum destination sites {https://www.facebook.com/thesimm.org} if in our own future as gamers, via big brother patent standards being designed and set into future practice today.
I would not lose any sleep over it: Businesses need clients to exist.
Last edited by scaleworm; 01-05-2013 at 02:43 PM.
Game on!
The old hack wasn't as extensive as the one currently rumoured to be in the works. We may soon see the entire GPU opened up for homebrew, which would make it far more useful.
I read an article about this the other day. Maybe what Sony and the whole video game industry needs to do as a whole is stop trying to come up with ways to combat used game sales, and look at the bigger picture and find out why gamers buy used games. The answer is pretty easy from my perspective, new games are too fucking expensive. I would say 1-2% of games out there are actually worth full retail prices, the rest are $20 games at best. If Sony goes ahead with this patent, the PS4 will be done before it hits the market.
Personally, I am shocked at the amount of people who seem to be willing to throw their own consumer rights and the first sale doctrine under the bus in order to help giant corporations like EA make even more money than they already are. Every other company in the world that deals in non-perishable goods has to deal with used sales, why do video game companies think they are such special snowflakes?
@duffmanth. I think a third of the cost goes to retailers. Does anyone know how much Walmart/Gamestop make per game sold at $60? Is it $20?
Movies, video games, and music are all purchased on some sort of retail format and can be purchased transfered digitally. All of them are pirated. Two things in common between movies and music that aren't common for video games. Movies and music have more market penetration. Almost everyone watches movies or listens to music. These two formats also have other ways of making money. Movies, unless straight to DVD, they first sell millions at theaters and then later on can make more money being broadcast on television. With music, they make money going on tour.
But then you might say. What about car sales, clothes, etc. Can you pirate cars and clothes? Game manufacturers are fighting lost sales on two fronts. Piracy and used sales. After the first few months, sales on video games drop next to nothing.
Clothes outlets don't care about used clothes because they're already way overpriced anyways. That $30 Nike shirt you saw in the store probably cost $.08. That $5 shirt you bought from some generic manufacturer probably cost $.07. It's pretty much legal slave labor. The clothes manufacturers don't care if you buy your clothes used. They already make a ridiculous amount of money from the new clothes they do sell.
Car manufacturers make money on the sales of replacement parts for vehicles.
The $20 plastic toy that you bought for your kid on Christmas. The crappy design of it was probably thought of in the span of a day. Then the toy was more than likely produced mostly by machine.
Video game developers are actually putting a lot of money into their product before they get anything out of it. Why do you think most developers are starting to do digital games and online flash based games?
If Sony does this, I don't think it will be the death of the PS4 but it will greatly effect sales. You will see the PS4 being the 3rd place console. Personally, I have only paid the full $59.99 ($52.99 with a discount) price for a new game once, and that was for Street Fighter IV, and I felt ripped off especially since it went down in price so dramatically shortly afterward. So, the PS4 would be forced to drop their game prices to reach the gamers who aren't early adopters.
I totally disagree with technology that makes games harder to resell, but I do understand the frustration of the development studios (there *are* other studios besides EA out there). Gamestop is strongly eating into their profits - if a single copy of a game gets sold 10 times at Gamestop, the developer makes money once and Gamestop makes money 10 times. That hardly seems fair - Gamestop is just serving as a bloated middleman, and plenty of people are more than happy to throw game studios under the bus to save $5 on a game (after 'selling' some other game back to Gamestop for a fraction of what they originally paid).
Like I said previously, this patent really isn't going to go anywhere. It's probably as much defensive as anything else, preventing Nintendo or Microsoft from doing something similar without paying license fees. In a perfect world, if there were a way to preserve first sale doctrine and cut Gamestop down to size, then I'd be all for that.
Gamestop flat out punishes people for buying new. If you buy a new $60 game and don't like it, you can return it for $20 worth of credit. If ypu bought that same game used for $55, you could return it for $55 in credit.
I don't think Sony's patent is so much anti-consumer as it is anti-Gamestop and consumer-indifferent.
It's the same as intrusive DRM; they aren't trying to hurt the consumer, they're trying to hurt someone else, and the consumer is just collateral damage.
That's not a punishment. Sure it's an encouragement to buy used, but there's no store that's going to let you return a new opened game for anything more than an exchange of the same title. And that policy is to generally protect the consumer from getting stuck with damaged product.
"And the book says: 'We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.'"
You're missing the point. You should get the same amount of credit for the game regardless of whether you bought it used or new.
You're returning a used game either way, but if you bought it new, they give you far less than if you bought it used.
That's just not right.
People aren't thinking long term about this, they are looking at the game that just came out being sold used for $55. But what they aren't looking at is the game that came out 15 years ago and is sitting at the Goodwill for $5. That is the market I am worried about with used sales. The preservation of games in the future.
The preservation of games is the domain of piracy.
There are a lot of computer and arcade games that would already have been lost if hobbyists hadn't been dumping them to modern computers.
I think preservation can only happen if you get the companies onboard. If it's always "us versus them" then a lot of the lore and development history will be lost forever. We're lucky to even have map sources for Quake, but there's tons of first-class work that went into games which has been lost because nobody preserved it or actively destroyed it.
scaleworm said something on the previous page which caught my attention. A lending library is a good idea because it lets people use modern media - but I think that what's just as important is to have things preserved. If something isn't preserved at all, not even a few people can access it.
You're exactly right I worked at a small video game retailer about 10 years ago when the average console game price was $80 in Canada and $50 in the US, the exchange rate was way out of whack back then, and we made between $5-10 profit on any given game. I still have friends that work at video game retailers, and those are still the current profit margins on games. Consoles are even worse, retailers make less than $5 profit on a console. If the used game market goes away, video games at the store level will be done, stores can't survive on shitty little profit like those that I mentioned.
Last edited by duffmanth; 01-07-2013 at 03:15 PM.
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Last edited by AlphaGamer; 04-02-2017 at 11:27 AM.