Used Games = Piracy?

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Nique

The problem is that they see piracy (and now some saying used buying too I guess) as a 1:1 loss when it isn't. Is Piracy wrong morally or whatever? IMO, yes more or less. Does every pirated copy of a game = one lost sale? Almost certainly no.



I don't know if this really is accurate either though. I mean, TBH I think "Gamers" are really like A-list douchebags pretty often especially in the sub culture of pirating the ever loving crap out of everything. Things shared between pirates likely stays pirated.

The issue with the 1:1 thing is that there's no good way to guess how many people would have otherwise bought the game. There IS some data that says what happens after a game is pirated. To be blunt, it doesn't turn into a sale. But that's something that's easy enough to guess from common sense. If you've played and beaten and still own a game, chances are you're not going to rush out and buy it, no matter how much people like to wave the moral flag of how they, sample size of one, are going to or would.

So while not every copy pirated is a lost sale, pretty much every copy pirated as a "demo" is.

That leaves you with only half the picture. You know that a pirated copy is not going to turn into a sale, but you don't know how many sales are actually being lost to pirated copies. In the business of business, you always hedge your bets with money, meaning in this case, they're making unreasonable assumptions.

Originally Posted by Jagos

The problem with their POV, is that it's incredibly short -sighted. There's little to no longevity in their planning.

If they had donate buttons instead of licensing deals, we could figure something out. Or maybe if they'd stop doing stupid things to piss off their fanbase (Activision, Ubisoft...), we could enjoy the games.

And one other idea, licensing engines for X amount of dollars? Stupid. Give it up for free and charge something for distribution. Having developers become publishers in some sense may actually increase the profits. These are just a few ideas.

Right now, as I see it, their mindsets seem quite limited.

The issue with licensing an engine is that that's the deal that makes most sense.

First off, making an engine from scratch is hard. You have to really know what you're doing and be comfortable with low-level access, which is why we reuse them to high Heaven once we have one finished and debugged. Writing them is simply not fun. That's a double-whammy, because it means that other people aren't going to want to have to write one. So how do you get your money out of the pit? You license it. People are willing to pay good money so they don't have to go through the hassle.

Basically, an engine is no different than any other software package. The programming industry lives and dies by reusable code. If you need something pre-done for you, you shop around and buy the package that best fits your needs, modify it as necessary if it's legal in the terms, and integrate it into the rest of your system. It lets you get your own work done and get the product out faster.

If engines were all free, it would mean a LOT of time and money down the hole with no way to recoup the costs. Aside from that, there are free open-source engines out there, such as Blender's or OGRE. They just don't see business use to my knowledge. I can't speak for their quality, but they are out there for the indie guys.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

You know there is a simpler way they can do this that won't amount to screwing everyone over (I'm almost defiantly not buying a new gen system if this goes live). Pressure law makers or used game stores to provide a 50% cut of all used game sales on their titles. You make a profit off a game you refuse to rerelease. And we don't have to wake up in the morning to find Game stop boarded up because the insecure babies caused a second game crash.

[Jagos]

You do realize that Madden '06 players would revolt right?

[Kyanbu The Legend]

That's a risk worth taking. (If you were responding to me)

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Jagos

You do realize that Madden '06 players would revolt right?

People still play Madden '06? I thought all the servers were shut down for up to Madden '09 due to lack of interest.

(Seriously, though, that was a bad move on their part.)

[Jagos]

That's more a joke.
Most sports games are notorious for reselling at $2 dollars in one year.

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

People still play Madden '06? I thought all the servers were shut down for up to Madden '09 due to lack of interest.

(Seriously, though, that was a bad move on their part.)

Actually, it's not. It causes everyone to update to the new game and keep EA's money train rolling. Think about if someone put up a dedicated server for their older games...

You know there is a simpler way they can do this that won't amount to screwing everyone over (I'm almost defiantly not buying a new gen system if this goes live). Pressure law makers or used game stores to provide a 50% cut of all used game sales on their titles. You make a profit off a game you refuse to rerelease. And we don't have to wake up in the morning to find Game stop boarded up because the insecure babies caused a second game crash.

This would actually be the worst thing to happen to gaming. It'd be just like when the DMCA was created by the RIAA. That would kill gaming more than anything.

[Magus]

I don't see polygon count as increasing the price, since to me it just seems like "use stronger computer to generate 3D models with larger polygon count", but yeah, if it literally takes more manhours because they have to model more individual objects then it makes sense that the price would go up on the high end. However, the games that used to sell for 20.00 on the low end when released as Greatest Hits are now 30.00 minimum brand-new, it's kind of annoying, and the controller, instead of replacing the Dualshock 2 at 29.99, they just raised the price to 50.00 and left the Dualshock 2 at 30.00 (for whatever reason I can't really fathom, okay, it costs more because it has SIXAXIS in it, which was a near-worthless money sink at this point, it's not the consumer's fault). Basically I just see a lot of price-gouging going on in little ways in an attempt to get more money out of people for no particular reason (especially as applies to games that continue to not cost as much as others--God of War III possesses the quality to charge 60.00, probably, but WWE is shit at any price so for that particular company it's not justified, it's just because in the current market they can charge that much that they do, as I doubt it cost near as much as GoW3 and probably is a nth of the quality).

The idea of making games stores give a 50% cut of used game sales to the companies is insane, btw, I agree with Jagos on that. Pretty soon used book stores will be having to pay 50% to the publishers or Suncoast will have to start paying 50% to the studios, for something that is a hard-copy one-unit item. Online distribution is one thing, but a single physical game disc is a single physical game disc.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Magus

I don't see polygon count as increasing the price, since to me it just seems like "use stronger computer to generate 3D models with larger polygon count", but yeah, if it literally takes more manhours because they have to model more individual objects then it makes sense that the price would go up on the high end. However, the games that used to sell for 20.00 on the low end when released as Greatest Hits are now 30.00 minimum brand-new, it's kind of annoying, and the controller, instead of replacing the Dualshock 2 at 29.99, they just raised the price to 50.00 and left the Dualshock 2 at 30.00 (for whatever reason I can't really fathom, okay, it costs more because it has SIXAXIS in it, which was a near-worthless money sink at this point, it's not the consumer's fault). Basically I just see a lot of price-gouging going on in little ways in an attempt to get more money out of people for no particular reason (especially as applies to games that continue to not cost as much as others--God of War III possesses the quality to charge 60.00, probably, but WWE is shit at any price so for that particular company it's not justified, it's just because in the current market they can charge that much that they do, as I doubt it cost near as much as GoW3 and probably is a nth of the quality).

The idea of making games stores give a 50% cut of used game sales to the companies is insane, btw, I agree with Jagos on that. Pretty soon used book stores will be having to pay 50% to the publishers or Suncoast will have to start paying 50% to the studios, for something that is a hard-copy one-unit item. Online distribution is one thing, but a single physical game disc is a single physical game disc.

This... Let me explain this to you.

There is no magic "increase polygon count" button. It all has to be done by hand. Maybe you can get away with using a base model for characters, but that base model still needs to be made. Even then, you have to do all their different outfits over it, which is basically the same amount of work as just starting from scratch unless you have standardized meshes like Oblivion where all the world shares the same ten or so basic outfit shapes.

I mean I hate to break it to you, but this is definitely not your area of expertise. The reason things are more expensive to make is entirely because of the higher polygon count.

[Krylo]

Well the higher polygon count and the fact that game prices haven't been keeping up with inflation for the last 30 years.