Used games haven't been a part of my life until recently. I got a few used games for my birthday a few years back, and none of them worked properly. I swore blind I'd never buy used games myself, having seen how unreliable they could be. In the more recent past, though, I've purchased games I couldn't possibly buy new, ie. cartridges for my Nintendo 64, a few games for my PlayStation 2, and another title for the GameCube my friend gave me. I bought most of these games off eBay, and haven't had a single faulty game delivered to me yet. A few of the older games needed cleaning to get them working (no one ever cleans N64 carts -_-), and some of them are a little unreliable, requiring me to blow into the connectors, turn the machine on and off a few times, and fiddle around with the cartridge to ensure it's in all the way. But they do all work eventually, so I'm happy.
I'd normally just stick to using an emulator to play retro titles, but emulators can be unfaithful to the originals they allow me to play, requiring me to use a different controller layout to the original (the PS3 controller I use on my computer hardly resembles an N64 controller), not to mention all the glitches and errors you run into, some of which are simply unavoidable. Fifth generation games made the leap into the third dimension, and with that, emulation became a lot less simple and a lot more buggy :P So, I bought a genuine Nintendo 64 and some official controllers (nothing but licensed hardware for my baby) and I started to collect games for it, my library totalling about 16 games at the moment. I never touch my N64 emulator now, only using it to test games I might like to buy for my real machine in the future.
The reason I bring this up revolves around the next generation of consoles, discussion brewing about the potential inability to play used games on the next PlayStation and/or the next Xbox. Little is known about these machines at the moment, but already, people are discussing the possibility of, and the justification behind, a ban by console manufacturers on the use of pre-owned titles on their systems.
The way console makers would do this is simple, and it's already being done, having been commonplace in the PC market for some time now. Basically, you'll buy a hard copy of a new game from a game store, a department store, an online distribution centre—wherever you get your physical copies from. You bring the game to the console, you open the case, and you look through the written materials for your activation code. You find it, put the game in, and enter the code when the game asks you to. The game is now digitally tethered to your console, this code forever buried in your system, unrecoverable; you can't unregister the game, not now, not ever. You can't sell the game to someone else because they won't be able to use it on their system. You can't lend the game to a friend for the same reason. In more recent times, some of these activation codes have been purely for online-play—if you lend or sell the game, the player can access all the single-player content, but can't play online multiplayer.
PC titles have had activation codes for ages now, but seeing as PC gaming is moving into digital distribution far faster than the console market is (primarily via Steam), this isn't really an issue for the PC folk, not anymore. PC games are also far easier to copy (and the copies far easier to use) than their console counterparts, so this protection was at least somewhat understandable.
But why would they implement such a system? Supporters claim that it will increase profits for developers whereby everyone who wants to play the game will have to buy it, every player supporting the developers. They could also argue that it reduces piracy this way.
Here's my problem: what makes a video game different to any other consumer item such that I'm not allowed to sell it? What makes a game different to, say, a cup, or a table, or a pot plant, or a car, or a bag of chips? I'm almost guaranteed to be able to resell any of those, given I'm honest to the seller about what it is (I can't con people into buying a car that doesn't work or a bag of chips that's out of date). There might be a bit of paperwork involved in the transfer, especially with bigger items, but the fact of the matter is I can still sell them, the buyer can use them once they've been purchased, and the seller can't use them once they've been sold. In the same way, I can sell someone a video game, and once they have it, they can use it, while I'm unable to use it (physical copies of console games almost never let you play them without the original disc/cartridge, even if it had to install some or all of the data onto a storage device of some kind). It works the same way for all consumer items, even other digital items like CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays: you can buy and sell them as you wish, and access isn't tied to any particular machine or device.
And what is this crap about supporting the developers, that everyone who plays the game owes the developers money? Again, why doesn't this apply to everything else? Let's say I buy a hammer (I would never buy a hammer, but go with me, dammit :P). I paid for the hammer out of my own pocket, and that money is then sent to the people responsible for the hammer. The people who manufactured the hammer are paid for the materials they used and the effort put into its construction; the designer of the hammer is paid for their time choosing the shape and materials of the hammer; the distributor (if there is one) is paid for their costs in moving the hammer from its place of origin to the retailer; and the retailer is paid for the maintenance of the premises from which the hammer was bought, as well as the labour costs of the teller working the cash register and putting the hammer in a plastic bag for me. All contributing parties have effectively been reimbursed for their work. Following this transaction, the hammer in question is now my hammer. I own every part of the hammer, from the handle to the metal bit. Let's say I use it solely at my workbench, leaving it there if I'm not using it; but it's not attached to it, neither physically nor legally. I can take it where I please: to other parts of my house, to worksites, even to other people's workbenches, all without hassle.
A friend of mine, a fellow hammer-person, wants to borrow my hammer, or perhaps even buy it off me. What's stopping him from doing that? If I lend him the hammer, or sell it to him, I lose access to the hammer, no longer able to profit from its capabilities, transferring that ability to my friend either temporarily or permanently. He doesn't have to pay a royalty fee to the manufacturer or the distributor as part of the exchange; I covered those costs with the initial transaction. They are owed nothing because they've already been reimbursed for their work. It's not as if I'd owe the companies more if I continued to own the hammer and get the same benefits from it that my friend would if I lent or sold it to him, so why should he have to pay those costs when he buys it?
Replace 'hammer' with 'video game', and it's the same fucking thing. Neither you nor your customer owes the developer or the publisher anything when you sell the game to them. Their work in designing and distributing the game has already been paid for by you with your initial purchase. This person gets nothing more from the developers or the publishers than you would if you kept the game, so why are they owed money? Because they aren't :P
But games are easily copied, you say? People who sell them could have already copied them to another storage device—allowing used games must facilitate piracy! Well sure, people who sell their games could be copying them... just as people who sell CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays could be copying them before they sell them too. Here's the difference: selling used CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays is perfectly legal in most circumstances, whereas all you care about is used games. What about the musicians and the record label who produced that music, or the film-makers and distributors who made those movies possible? Don't they too deserve royalties on every single sale of their products, whether it be a new copy or a used copy? No, they don't. That's why they don't get royalties on used sales: cos they don't deserve them :P
And what if I wanna buy an old game fifteen or twenty years down the track, a classic PS4 game—Grand Theft Auto VII, LittleBigPlanet 3, Ratchet and Clank: Curse of the Pearl Necklace, something like that—but I can't because they don't allow me to play used games? I can neither borrow nor buy a friend's copy due to the restriction, so that's not an option. Thing is, the games wouldn't be in print anymore, so finding a new copy that's yet to be activated would be damn near impossible (though I suppose anyone who bought games and kept them un-activated could be in for a fortune later down the track, if they were patient enough :P). What's stopping me from buying these games? An irretrievable license? That's bullshit.
But what if the licenses were retrievable? Well, while that's good and all, what if the online service that allows them to be activated and de-activated goes down? Users who want to lend or sell their copies can't deactivate them, and even users who get their hands on a copy that's yet to be activated are out of luck because the servers are no longer online. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft won't keep the online services for their current consoles available forever—it simply isn't profitable to keep 'em online if only a few people are using them.
Just buy old games through the online store, you say? I should just wait for a re-release on the next-gen's Virtual Console (or similarly named classics line-up), purchase the new console, and get my nostalgia fix that way. Really? Why? There are unused hard copies in households all over the world, belonging to people who'd be happy to sell them to me seeing as they no longer want them... but I can't use them myself, so that's irrelevant. That's not to mention the fact that not all older titles are re-released onto the online market for use on newer machines. And when games are re-released, sometimes these re-releases are different from their originals (programming/emulation issues, music/brand licensing, etc.), so it's hardly an alternative to begin with. I want the original game to play on an original machine. So long as I have both the game and the console in my possession, is that really too much to ask for?
But what if we make the move to downloadable gaming? What if there are no hard copies? Then there are no copies to be sold; that's the nature of the form. It's the same with music you buy from iTunes: the content is too easy to reproduce, so selling it (or copies of it) isn't allowed under the terms of use. You have never been able to re-sell downloadable titles (from what I'm aware of), so maintaining that restriction changes nothing; nor do I have any issue with keeping things that way, because it makes perfect sense. The fact of the matter is, though, that there are still hard copies of games being manufactured, and we should be able to sell those copies as we do anything else.
Implementation of this restriction would even contribute to environmental waste: older games are no longer viable consumer items, so where will they end up when they're no longer wanted? In the trash. They could be on eBay, or in a garage sale, or a flea market, or even a games store who trades games in. But no—they'll be thrown away, more garbage for our planet to handle. It's ridiculous.
The reasoning behind the banning of used games is simple: console manufacturers don't like used games because their developers and publishers get less money with their legality than without it—not less deserved money, just less money. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all want their developers and publishers to make as much moolah as possible so they can keep pumping out titles for their systems, and we all know that. They are the ones implementing this restriction—not the developers (bar first-party developers), but the console manufacturers (who also often double as publishers for first- and second-party titles). They're doing this because it's in their best interests, which may not mirror those of the developer. Surely, any developer who puts time and care into their games is more concerned with the quality of the final product than sales, and would perhaps even like people to be able to buy and play used copies further down the line when they're no longer in print, so who says they want this? They have no say in this decision whatsoever.
I know that game development is expensive and that game development is a tough environment to be working in—I've heard this from developers themselves countless times. Banning the use of used games, however, isn't the way to solve the problem. If you don't want used games fucking with your sales, distribute the title digitally; otherwise, bear the brunt and find another way to increase profits.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
No comments:
Post a Comment