Developers Fight Used Game Sales
It is absolutely crazy seeing Marty O’Donnel, a Bungie dev for Halo (hello… multi-million dollar profits), lament and complain in this quote:
“It’s hard to gauge the effect of used game sales on Halo, but I’m sure it’s big,” O’Donnell commented. “Complaining about sales when you have a multi-million seller is somewhat difficult to justify, but it seems to me that the folks who create and publish a game shouldn’t stop receiving income from further sales.”
“It will be harder for smaller titles to be successful in the future if they can’t fully realise a return on investment,” he explained.
that the second hand market for game sales is negatively impacting their sales. The problem is that it is completely wrong in both a common sense and an economic viewpoint. It totally goes against everything I know about the First Sale doctrine, which has protected the second hand market for CDs ( the RIAA wants a cut of that market as well). So with the first sale doctrine, once you purchase a product you (as the buyer) have every right to re-sell that product.. WITHOUT paying the creator anything. So that plus the fact that it has been proven that used game sales really can help a video game grow in the market.
Thats only the first part of developers fighting used game sales; they now want to offer free downloadable content, BUT it is only a one time use. New copies of Gears of War 2 will come with 5 new multiplayer map, but it is a special code that only has a one time use. Even better is the fact that none of these maps will be offered as downloadable content.
Some people will say that by countering used game sales, the first purchases will get some added value. The problem is that they aren’t really adding value, they are removing it and then putting it back in with restrictions for the sole purpose of crushing the used game market.
If it is anything like the DLC for Halo 3 for matchmaking, if I don’t have the latest and greatest maps, I will get kicked or be unable to join a game. I ran into it ALL THE TIME in Gears of War when the DLC came out. I didn’t pick it up right away and every other map on the servers I would join; I would be kicked. This means with the new Gears of War, I will be twice as screwed when the map changes, just because I wanted to save some money and picked up the game at a later date. It seems that just because they want a chunk of used game sales, the developers are willing to alienate their potential customers at the same time.
Hell, what happens if my Xbox Red Rings of Death or it completely dies? Does this mean I have to purchase a whole new game to get that DLC code again? I think not!
Coming from a gamer who doesn’t always have the cash flow to purchase every game brand new, If they tried to kill used game sales, it means that I either buy it new, or not at all. And more often than not, I would just not purchase the game and just boycott the developer. At least you wont see these one time codes ( for the most part) in PC games, because somebody would soon find a crack to add it back into the game anyways.
I have talked to a few game center owners and a few of them are ok with this kind of decision, saying that it is way better than Digital Rights Management… thats like saying having the Clap is better than genital warts.. its all horrible. Now DRM is truly horrible, but that is another rant for another day.
So when somebody tells you that the developers just NEED to have a piece of used game sales, remember that the First Sale Doctrine says otherwise!
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Time October 28, 2008 at 8:55 am
[...] happy about developers trying to crack down on used game sales. As I mentioned earlier about developers using one time codes to create extra “incentive” for buying new, it seems that Techdirt has some more info [...]