Originally Posted by
danawhitaker
Why is that greed? It's *my* money. I spent my hard-earned money on something, and if I decide I'm done with it, and choose to sell it, give it away, etc., why should any corporation have the right to tell me I can't? I could understand if it meant I still retained the ability to play the game once I got rid of it - but that's not the case. Do you think all goods should be like this? You mention the movie industry - but you can still buy DVDs and Blu-ray discs and resell them the way the used game market currently works. They aren't locked to your player. You can loan them out, rent them, borrow them, etc, pretty much without restriction. The same goes for books. You can buy them, loan them, trade them, sell them, borrow them from the library. If I buy a shirt from the Gap and decide I don't like the way it looks, the Gap doesn't prohibit me from giving it to a friend, or donating it to Goodwill. I'm sure they'd prefer that I'd send my friend in to buy a brand new shirt from them instead. Every industry would love it if we all patronized their establishments more and paid full price for everything, and never shared or traded. Cars manufacturers would be thrilled if everyone had to buy new cars. Do you think any of these moves would actually be good for the economy? Prohibiting people from being able to purchase things second-hand (and more affordably) is a slippery slope that I'm just not willing to go down. It's bad enough we've gotten to the point we have with software licensing. I wish I could sell my copy of Diablo 3 because it's garbage and not worth the $60 someone has to pay. Unfortunately it's tied to my Battle.net account for eternity, where maybe I could allow my daughter to play it. But only while she's a minor. Then Blizzard restricts you from sharing your Battle.net account. I love corporations telling me what I can and can't let other family members play on the computer I paid for, with the software I paid for.
Even with licensed software, if I give away or sell my entire computer, with all the software installed, Microsoft has no idea that I've transferred my copy of Windows to someone else. They have no way to stop it. The only way they'd be able to is if they take the Steam, Origin, or Blizzard model and require you to tie your software keys to a single-user account. Why are you so willing to sign away your rights to use products you buy? Do you really hate gaming the way it was in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s so much that you want to see all our rights as collectors out the window? I'm absolutely at a loss I guess as to how people in the gaming community can be so willing to roll over and let the corporations trample all over us. Or maybe there are just some industry shills here pushing the agenda. I can't fathom people choosing to be anti-consumer-rights.
Why is it for a few decades many companies have been able to do just fine in this industry, yet all of a sudden it's a problem? I saw yesterday the 360 has sold 76 million units worldwide? Cry me a river about lack of profits. Even if the slim profit margin on hardware, that's a lot of money by itself. No one is advocating a model where all games are free and cost no money. Show me ten game companies that went out of business because people were buying used games instead of new ones. I bet you'll find significantly more went of business due to mis-management, failing to understand the demands of the market, and developing or publishing games that were sub-par on a consistent basis. In fact, I bet you won't find one that went out of business because of used games.
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