EA games decides they're not hated enough

[Isil`Zha]

Another interesting note:

What happens to a family console or other shared console (roommates, etc) with this stuff now? IE: If someone buys a new EA game with their new scheme, is only their account able to play online, then? Now everyone in the household has to fork over another $10?

Where was the lost sale in that scenario? How many people actually buy a separate copy for each person of a household that wants to play a particular game?

[Dooey Jo]

There is nothing stopping the publishers themselves from inventing their own "used games" model if they wanted in on that market,

They are; it's called pay-to-play. There are already various over-hyped 'cloud gaming' concepts, where you play the games on company servers and stream the video to your netbook / smart TV. MMORPGs make up an ever growing share of PC game revenues. Rental and flat-rate subscription (to a given publisher's back catalogue) models for games have been talked about a lot in the industry press, they're coming.

Exactly, so there's no reason why they would instead try to reduce people's rights to their own property.

if only they didn't want to suck as much money as absolutely possible out of people

This is the basic goal of commercial enterprise.

Yeah, it's also the reason we have consumer protection laws.

instead preferring to prevent perfectly reasonable things like people selling stuff they legitimately own.

IP isn't 'stuff'. Most physical products are either immediately consumable or have a fixed useful life, e.g. a car lasts 100,000 to 200,000 miles. Selling the car just means the remaining useful life will be consumed by someone else. Games have an indeterminate number of resale cycles; in principle they can be resold indefinitely. People who resell the game after a few weeks are probably getting 80% of the value of people who keep it indefinitely; you effectively pay the second-in price (and convenience of not having to sell) for the pleasure of having a shelf full of game DVDs to look at.

You pretty much could say the same thing about books. Especially student literature. The physical discs, instruction booklets, packaging and all that, will eventually get worn down.

Anyway, your quaint notions of games as physical property are rapidly becoming irrelevant. The games industry does not give a fuck what you think, because all the threatened nerd-rage-fueled boycotts of games have had negiliable sales impact. Digital downloads keep ramping up, online activation is getting more and more pervasive. The industry wants the 'you purchase a non-transferrable right to play our game' model, and the only real barrier to that is the state of the Internet infrastructure. As soon as the penetration of fast always-on broadband is high enough, publishers can ditch physical media and require an Internet connection to play the games. The opinion of developers is almost as irrelevant as that of whiny gamers, they will do what the publishers tell them to if they want to keep making mass market games.

Uh yeah, I just said that gamers tend to let themselves get abused in ways other consumer groups would not. Perhaps thankfully, online distribution will make actual publishers more irrelevant, as developers can just distribute and sell their games directly, or via Steam and the like. But that has nothing to do with the discussion of how assholish it to try to make a physical copy of a game effectively worthless after it has been used once.

[Stark]

Another interesting note:

What happens to a family console or other shared console (roommates, etc) with this stuff now? IE: If someone buys a new EA game with their new scheme, is only their account able to play online, then? Now everyone in the household has to fork over another $10?

Where was the lost sale in that scenario? How many people actually buy a separate copy for each person of a household that wants to play a particular game?

On 360 at least, DLC is owned by a) the profile buying it and b) the HDD in the console its first downloaded to. In this way my gf and I are able to use Blands DLC without having to buy a copy each for our two 360s, but if you take your profile away, the 'original' 360 can still play it.

When you buy a new 360 MS 'lets' you transfer the licences to your new serial number.

[Starglider]

Yeah, it's also the reason we have consumer protection laws.

Good luck trying to get laws made in favor of game consumers. So far politicians only get interested when they're trying to censor games as part of a 'moral crusade'.

You pretty much could say the same thing about books.

Of course; this is the idea behind DRM-laden e-readers. You download a non-transferable license to read the content. However this fundamentally can't work as a business model. Obviously only a small fraction of the population has e-readers and most people like to have physical books. However even if that changed, written material is fundamentally pretty easy to pirate; even if the DRM isn't cracked (and it probably will be) you just need a scanner, or worst case retype the text to make an unencumbered copy.

Games are already delivered through a DRM-compatible medium, and are much harder to pirate; more or less impossible, for the 'run game logic on secure server' option.

Perhaps thankfully, online distribution will make actual publishers more irrelevant, as developers can just distribute and sell their games directly, or via Steam and the like.

Developers can't get the funding to make AAA titles without publishers. Any 'developer' who can will have to act like a publisher (see: Rockstar).

But that has nothing to do with the discussion of how assholish it to try to make a physical copy of a game effectively worthless after it has been used once.

You have a simple choice. You can buy indie games from developers who care about this stuff. They will be cheap, DRM free, usually in 2D, with a quality and length that reflects their zero to six figure budgets. Or you can buy games that were made with eight or nine figure budgets by developers controlled by major publishers and accept the draconian asset protection required to justify those budgets.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Yeah, it's also the reason we have consumer protection laws.

Good luck trying to get laws made in favor of game consumers. So far politicians only get interested when they're trying to censor games as part of a 'moral crusade'.

It's an age issue. Politicians are, on average, middle aged. Currently this means that nearly all powerful politicians were born before 1975 and therefore at least 20-25 when gaming started to become mainstream during the late 1990s. On average over 30, which means that video gaming for the great majority of them is still something only kids do. This will slowly change, but in most Western countries it will require the baby boomers to retire from politics before the voice of the people born after 1970 will have much weight in the overall scheme of things. Boomers are now over 50 in most countries, but it will still take at least 20 years before their grip on politics will finally be relinquished. Even the younger politicians today still have to think about that generation, because they control so much votes.