General_Norris wrote:MrPopo wrote:It is. With regular piracy you have a non-paying customer. With used games you have a paying customer who doesn't pay the people who made the game.
This is simple. I buy a commodity. Since it's mine, I can sell it. If I sell it, I no longuer have the commodity, the number of commodities stays the same. Why should the developer get money from a second sale? It's not theirs anymore, it's mine because I bought it. You don't pay a fee to the furniture company if you decide to sell a chair.
The used market doesn't create more commodities, it only allows the legitimate owner of a commodity to fulfill their right to sell what they own. Basic rights of property and ownership, no more, no less.
Again, the problem isn't the used game market itself. The problem is that Gamestop has turned the used game market into something as big as the new game market. The only other market I can think of that has as many used sales is the car industry, but with a car you pay a heavy price for buying used. There's more wear and tear and you're at the higher maintenance cost area of the car's total lifespan. With video games there generally isn't a downside to buying used. Case and manual being missing tends to be the only thing, and that doesn't affect your ability to play and fully enjoy a game. So companies are looking into things like this or the online pass system to make a clear distinction between a new copy and a used copy.
A. If 2 players buy a new game together, that is good for the industry. You don't go and say they should each buy a game instead, for all we know they are going to buy 2 games together because they buy games together or whatever. The point is they are buying the game.
This is true. I'd argue that this is much, much less frequent then people buying used copies (and I'm not including the guy who raids Gamestop at the end of a console generation to get cheap PS2 titles). As I said above, the issue isn't used sales per say, it's the volume of used sales.
Still waiting for the day someone takes them to court over this. This is so unconstitutional it's going to be very funny to see them trying to make a case out of this. At least in most European countries.
Unconstitutional? Maybe it's illegal if you look at the laws of any particular country close enough, but I doubt it's unconstitutional anywhere.
I'm a pretty broke-ass college gamer, I rarely, if ever, buy games new. I have hundreds of games, and I've probably bought maybe a dozen or so new, and most of those were specific games that I'd waited years for (StarCraft II, etc.). If it weren't for used gamed, honestly I probably would hardly be into videogames, because I couldn't afford it.
If you have hundreds of games that were purchased at $10-20 each, you could instead have 25-75 games purchased at $50-60 each.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
