EA really punishes you for buying a game and you end up not liking it.

Unfortunately the second hand market is a taboo to publishers and developers because they cant squeeze more more money from the consumer on a sold item. From the way the industry is going everything might be cloudbase in the future.

Meaning you will rent your games and not own them anymore. Every publishers dream.

There is another thing.

The second hand market will be dried out.

Microsoft isn't releasing any emulating environments like DOSBOX for newer games.

Which means that Direktx can't be emulated right now - simply because no-one programs a thing like DOSBOX for Direktx environments.

Which means practically that in let's say 50 years old DOS games will still run - thanks to the developers of DOSBOX.

And games that use direktx won't.

Thanks to Microsoft.

Which means nothing but : Direktx-based games are considered as one-way wares : Use once, then throw away.

Which shows - implicitely - what The Industry thinks about us customers : "Consume our games, buy our games, but don't expect any service or other consumer-friendly behaviour !" - Cynically put.

In the future, DOS games will be very well documnted - thanks to the developers of DOSBOX.

Direktx-based games won't.

Forgettable.

Motoki said:

That's pretty much the way it is for almost every other good and item I can think of. They all have second hand markets. Books, CDs, Cars, hell even household objects. Between Ebay and Craigslist you are sure to find anything and everything being sold by someone second hand. The original producers of those items don't get money for them. That's the way it's been since ancient times, for as long as there has been currency and people making goods. It's hardly anything new.

Click to expand...

Except that when your car needs repairs there are a lot of spare parts nowadays that are custom made and thus only fit one model, making additional income for the manufacturer. The same applies for many household objects (if there even is a market for used blenders, coffee machines and such).

CDs and Books both have additional income channels as well (libraries for books and concerts, radio fees and merchandise for music).

The gaming industry have 1 and only 1 way to make money: Buy the game through an official channel or you are no better (in terms of providing revenue) than a pirate.

fatBastard() said:

The gaming industry have 1 and only 1 way to make money: Buy the game through an official channel or you are no better (in terms of providing revenue) than a pirate.

Click to expand...

As Motoki explained before when you purchase an item you should be able to sell it at a much lower price anything less is a strike against our consumer rights.

EDIT: Also a game's "likeability" is different to everyone. You dont know if you like a game before you play it for a significant time unlike everythign else.

Motoki said:

That's pretty much the way it is for almost every other good and item I can think of. They all have second hand markets. Books, CDs, Cars, hell even household objects. Between Ebay and Craigslist you are sure to find anything and everything being sold by someone second hand. The original producers of those items don't get money for them. That's the way it's been since ancient times, for as long as there has been currency and people making goods. It's hardly anything new.

Click to expand...

But programs (it's not just games, folks, it's all programs) are something very new indeed. If you give a book away then it's gone. If you give away a program, it's still sitting there on your computer unless you delete it. How does the company know if you did or not? You can make the program require a CD but then you would need to keep your Windows CD in the drive, your Office CD in the drive, a few game program CDs in your drive... it would get stupid very, very fast as you either have to get a full tower of CD drives or do a heck of a lot of swapping.

So what the software industry did was LICENSE the program to you - like leasing a car for a flat rate. You don't buy a program, you buy permission to run the program on your computer. That license is not something you can resell.

But people just don't understand that. There's an AutoCad case running through the courts right now that might shut down the used program industry but I think it's more likely that companies will just change the situation and start moving to thin client (marketers like to call it cloud based) setups. You don't get the program on your PC ever. All you do is log your computer in to the owning company's server and use the program on their computer. That actually matches what the licenses were supposed to be doing all the time - the company still owns the program, you are just paying for the right to run the program.

Zloth said:

But programs (it's not just games, folks, it's all programs) are something very new indeed. If you give a book away then it's gone. If you give away a program, it's still sitting there on your computer unless you delete it. How does the company know if you did or not? You can make the program require a CD but then you would need to keep your Windows CD in the drive, your Office CD in the drive, a few game program CDs in your drive… it would get stupid very, very fast as you either have to get a full tower of CD drives or do a heck of a lot of swapping.

So what the software industry did was LICENSE the program to you - like leasing a car for a flat rate. You don't buy a program, you buy permission to run the program on your computer. That license is not something you can resell.

But people just don't understand that. There's an AutoCad case running through the courts right now that might shut down the used program industry but I think it's more likely that companies will just change the situation and start moving to thin client (marketers like to call it cloud based) setups. You don't get the program on your PC ever. All you do is log your computer in to the owning company's server and use the program on their computer. That actually matches what the licenses were supposed to be doing all the time - the company still owns the program, you are just paying for the right to run the program.

Click to expand...

An interesting point, and I think your logic is valid, but I must disagree from an idealistic point of view. I realize that computer programs and the sale of digital data is a complicated field and all, but I object as a paying customer to not having the right of owning the final product. With digital distribution, the customer does pay for a license to run the program and doesn't appear to have the right to claim ownership, but what about physical disks? If I buy a boxed game (or a boxed software program of any type) it should follow that the ownership of the item has transferred into my hands to do with it as I please - in the same way that the transfer of any physical item (such as a car) grants full possession to the buyer.

It simply appears to me that a system that prevents a consumer from taking full possession of a product is a violation of the free market and an offense against the rights of the buyer. The only area that I can live with the concept of "licensing, not owning" is in the realm of digital distribution - and I fear that one day the physical software market will be destroyed by software companies as a means of circumventing the rights of the consumers to buy and sell secondhand products - which can only lead to severe price-fixing and will most likely encourage piracy.

Zloth said:

So what the software industry did was LICENSE the program to you - like leasing a car for a flat rate. You don't buy a program, you buy permission to run the program on your computer. That license is not something you can resell.

Click to expand...

Kicking in row B. Licenses can be something you can resell. Hence an exemption for the video game industry. Nothing different from owning a product and not being able to resell it. It is only shifting.

The license angle is more to prevent an owner from modifying the content of the game, something that can be applied easily through a licensing system, much less through a product ownership system (usually modification of an owned product leads to cancellation of warranty)

Motoki said:

Books, CDs, Cars, hell even household objects.

Click to expand...

Cars wear down. Buying a ten year old used car has its downsides. Buying a ten year old video game gives a fresh as new product.

Books and CDs are different from video games as they do not build up their own concurrence in the same way.

Nearly no expectation on a book to improve on previous books.

The video game industry is articulated around generations and games from a generation are expected to be better than the games from the previous generation.

It grows worse in terms of series like The Sims for which one day, improvements might no longer be possible to deliver or the next iteration does not deliver an improvement over the current iteration.
It voids incentives to buy a product.

From the video game industry, this building up concurrence is something to harness or they will put themselves out of business mechanically, by their own efforts.

fatBastard() said:

Except that when your car needs repairs there are a lot of spare parts nowadays that are custom made and thus only fit one model, making additional income for the manufacturer. The same applies for many household objects (if there even is a market for used blenders, coffee machines and such).

Click to expand...

Additional income in terms of what? They manufacture an item and get revenues for it. The video game industry already follows this path with DLCs, add-ons, extensions.

CDs and Books both have additional income channels as well (libraries for books and concerts, radio fees and merchandise for music).

Click to expand...

Reads like licensing a game engine.

The gaming industry have 1 and only 1 way to make money: Buy the game through an official channel or you are no better (in terms of providing revenue) than a pirate.

Click to expand...

Bargain bin shops are also official. Used market channels can also be official.

Corwin said:

Simple, don't buy games from EA!!

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For this comment, I'll give a finger... up! -b

Exactly, if you don't care about the sports games and plus with the new generic action rpg direction Bioware is going with DA 2, you aren't missing much by skipping EA games.

I was never quite interested in EA's sports games - with one exception : One edition of a soccer/football game with the manager of my town's football team on it.

It was an Add-On, though, which was the reason why I never bought it.

I guess that the sports games and the SIMs are to EA what Office and Windoes are to Microsoft …

And what's astonishing is, that BOTH companies (or ANY company beginning from a certain size on) don't have any creativity anymore -

- when the are in need of creativity, they BUY it.

They are NOT able anymore to be creative from within anymore, imho, from a certain size on.

You are missing the Sims.

azraelck said:

Don't download the Steam virus and give those scammers your CC info.

If it requires any additional software to run beyond the OS, drivers, and game itself, then it must be suspected. If a single player requires you to have an internet connection, the only reason is for fraud and identity theft. If gamers would simply file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission (or their country's equivalent), maybe then we could get rid of these scammers and viruses quickly. As it is, the scammers will eventually abandon the market as no one sane or with an IQ above that of a brick will buy their titles, and only legitimate publishers will remain selling games for the PC.

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Did you seriously just call Steam scammers and guilty of fraud and identity theft? And Steam client is a virus? really? a Virsus? I think you dropped your tin foil hat somewhere.

ChienAboyeur said:

You are missing the Sims.

Click to expand...

Yes. An highly creative an interesting idea in the beginning - EA was the only company that became interested in it anyway - but in the end it turned out to be handled like a cash-cow.

Nerevarine said:

An interesting point, and I think your logic is valid, but I must disagree from an idealistic point of view. I realize that computer programs and the sale of digital data is a complicated field and all, but I object as a paying customer to not having the right of owning the final product. With digital distribution, the customer does pay for a license to run the program and doesn't appear to have the right to claim ownership, but what about physical disks? If I buy a boxed game (or a boxed software program of any type) it should follow that the ownership of the item has transferred into my hands to do with it as I please - in the same way that the transfer of any physical item (such as a car) grants full possession to the buyer.

It simply appears to me that a system that prevents a consumer from taking full possession of a product is a violation of the free market and an offense against the rights of the buyer. The only area that I can live with the concept of "licensing, not owning" is in the realm of digital distribution - and I fear that one day the physical software market will be destroyed by software companies as a means of circumventing the rights of the consumers to buy and sell secondhand products - which can only lead to severe price-fixing and will most likely encourage piracy.

Click to expand...

The price if the disk is a pretty trivial thing here compared to the price of the program on the disk. If I sell your company a recipe for great cookies on the condition that you do not resell it, you can't get around that condition by selling the paper the recipe was written on. When you install a game, you make an agreement not to pass the license on to somebody else.

Your rights as a buyer aren't hurt at all. If you don't like the deal, don't buy the program. I don't think there was any collusion involved in getting to this business model. If you think companies are being stupid by using this method, start your own company up that does allow resells. I wouldn't be surprised if it did quite well. (Zloth tries to not look toward the Kindle) If some book publishing company started selling books but required you 'sign a contract' saying you would never resell the book, I would expect their sales to plummit.

ChienAboyeur said:

Kicking in row B. Licenses can be something you can resell. Hence an exemption for the video game industry. Nothing different from owning a product and not being able to resell it. It is only shifting.

The license angle is more to prevent an owner from modifying the content of the game, something that can be applied easily through a licensing system, much less through a product ownership system (usually modification of an owned product leads to cancellation of warranty)

Click to expand...

Yep, licenses CAN be something you can resell. Other times they can't. Like when you enter into a contract saying you won't.

Now you might be able to get out of that contract by saying you were forced into it. Maybe you could argue something along the lines of: "I didn't know about the agreement until I started to install the game. I tried to take it back to the store but they don't give refunds." Taking your money and then demanding that you agree to the terms of use seems a bit dubious to me.

The concept behind all this is of something called "intellectual property" can be sold, bought, licensed etc. .

And "intellectual property" is - in its very essence - nothing but thoughts.

It was human thoughts that developed these "things" that became labelled as "intellectual property".

And thoughts - then - can be sold, bought, licensed etc. ...

Now THIS is what REALLY worries me. EVERYTHING can be transformed into something that can be bought, sold, re-sold, licensed etc. ... And the "umbrella-concept" of all this is the Capitalism.

Thoughts aren't free.

They're wares.

Now.

No, they aren't quite thoughts, they are ideas - which are a collection of several thoughts. Very well developed ideas, too. And they have ALWAYS been something you can buy or sell. "You give me five chickens and I'll show you how to make a sauce that will make even slightly rancid chicken taste great."

But then - EVERYTHING can be transformed into money.

Even orgasms (prostitution).

That's capitalism at its very core : transforming EVERYTHING into material, into money.

It truly is a wonderful thing, Alrik.