Bitmob.com

However I see option 2 as more plausible than the possibility that tangible consumer rights will pass over to digital licences. It's not going to happen. There will not be a second hand market in the digital realm.

Option 2 was mostly just to highlight the logical solution to this problem, which is basically a monetary issue. Gamers want cheaper games, creators want more sales. I do not propose that it could be brought about quickly by a decision on the part of either side. Rather this is something that could happen through market forces over time, since we vote with our purchases. For me personally that often involves buying games when they go on sale. I really don't consider the latest fps shooter single player campaign which I finish in 10-20 hours to be worth the full price they charge nowadays. So I wait and buy when it's cheaper.

When I talk about preowned as a quasi form of rental I am trying to highlight the underlying motivations we have for our economic behaviours here. For example, why do we bother trading games in at all? Why did you decide that you do not want to "own" this game anymore? I feel that the answer is that we want to get some money back, and I feel the answer is important because it reveals a widely held attitude that most games are not worth their cost for the length of entertainment they provide. I think many gamers subconsciously do not want to pay a big premium to "own" a game forever, especially when they realise how quickly it gets regulated to the shelf. If we try and model our experiences with buying new and trading in, I see it as something like this,

"I played this game but I won't play it again so I want some money back because I don't think the full cost I paid for it is worth the time I have spent on it." A customer buys a game at $60. Plays game for 1 month. Trades game in for $30. End result, customer spent $30 to play that game for 1 month. What it all boils down to is paying X COST for Y LENGTH of play time. In my mind all market experiences with games and customers can be thought of in these terms, and these terms are analogous to a rental system. Even if you buy a game and keep it forever, never trading it in, Y is simply a very long time.

What we see when lots of preowned trading occurs is really very similar to a rental system. I used to manage an EB game's store and I remember the regular customers and their habits. Gamers would rock up on launch buy the full priced game. 2-4 weeks later they return saying they finished it, they then trade it in and get the next newest big game to come out, the cost of the previous game subsidising their next purchase, and so on and so on.

Thats what I mean when I say rental system. I think it's important to notice, that there are so many gamers (as evidenced by the popularity of trade in's and mmo subscriptions) that are revealing what they really care about in their gaming hobby; cost vs entertainment value. And my whole point is that this desire in gamers is being handled very messily at the moment, with the parallel used market. Some gamers benefit if they are the kinda people that trade in at the right times, other times you lose out. The whole point really is that it sucks that these games are set at such high prices right off that bat that we as gamers are forced to make use of parallel markets to recuperate costs in the first place.

I understand that it's unlikely publishers will lower prices, but really voting with your purchases is all you can do. Digital distribution will take over and it will be licenced and we will be at the mercy of the creator. But we should remember that at the end of the day they need our money to survive and we will always have that to vote with. There are many smaller developers that are making some interesting stuff on digital distribution platforms and by supporting them and their lower costed games as well as waiting for games to drop in price we are sending a healthy message to publishers that over time might be enough to break them out of the blockbuster big budget full priced games mentality."

We have been buying games on a physical medium for so long now that many of us have forgotten what it is we really pay for when we buy a game. Games have come on floppy disks, cartridges, CD's and DVD's over the years because it was the only realistic way to deliver the game to the consumer. It was not a choice of the publisher, but a necessity of the technology.

Along comes digital distribution and people start thinking. Hrmm I can't give this game to my friend now when I'm done, hrm I can't trade it back in when I am finished with it. Hrm I can't buy a cheap used copy instead of a regular priced one.

Then we start thinking how the economics of the industry works. Retailers sell a used game and the developer doesn't get a cut. Some people allude to how this is no better than piracy and that gets everyone thinking.

That this can even occur legally is due to what is called the first sale doctrine in the US, other countries like mine (Australia) call it the Exhaustion Doctrine. In simple terms it gives the buyer the legal right (which they normally wouldn't have if this law did not exist) to transfer their "licence" of the copyrighted work to another person. Its different to copying software because you are exhausting your original claim to the licence (i.e. I give you my apple, now I have no apple). I doubt the lack of this law would stop people reselling anyway, and its probably for that reason that the law exists in the first place; to protect a culturally accepted behaviour. We have always traded and bartered since before we had currency, it is socially ingrained. Why waste something that someone else could use and I could receive back from? But we think this way because we are use to thinking in terms of physical goods and not software (copyright, a legal construct we created).

The important thing to remember is that games are software licences and they always have been. When you buy them you do not own anything but the medium on which they are stored, and the medium is meaningless to us, we care only for the information stored on the disc. We are dealing with something fundamentally different to apples and oranges and tangible goods of our past.

As we move into the future and embrace digital distribution the used game market will slowly dissolve over time and this will be a non issue. Game licences that we have always been buying will become like the publisher's always wanted them to be, non transferable. further more there might be a push towards subscription models of business in all game types, not just mmo's. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I don't think it is either. Good and bad things will come of it, and we have already seen some of them (publishers charging full retail price for a digital distributed version etc). The point is, we should probably ask ourselves, how do we think video games should be sold?

Two interesting questions I can think of are,