Tuesday 1 May 2012

Should used games be abolished?


I was reading an article on Gamerant about how Crytek developers are in favour of the next generation consoles blocking of used games. While I understand why developers would want this to happen and would obviously be in favour of this: It could potentially lead to more sales of new games making them more money.

This has happened already on the PC side of gaming with the majority of PC games these days having some sort of DRM, be it Steam, Origin or Ubisofts always online DRM system which everyone loves to hate. The Point I'm getting to is that it seems that consoles may be taking a page out of the PCs side of the industry should rumours be true.

Since this has already happened over with the PC community and me primarily being a PC gamer, I am used to this anyway and it isn't as big of a deal to me as it is to a lot of console gamers. But due to the fact I can't buy used games on PC any more, places like Steam have realised this and took advantage with all there constant sales, now instead of buying used games I just wait until they go on sale and buy them cheap. My theory is if these rumours are true, consoles and developers should take a page out of Valves book and do something similar sale wise to keep customers happy.

At the end of the day though, I don't agree with this business practice. I'm all for companies trying to up sell their products it is a business after all and of course they need to make money. But to me this logic is ridiculous. Let's put this mentality into perspective shall we? Say I buy a brand new car, then after a while of using it I decide to sell it for whatever reason; to buy a better one, because I need the money or I just plain don't want it any more. Should the car manufacturer get a cut of my sale of a product which is rightfully mine now? No, of course they shouldn't, they set a price that they thought reasonable to make back the money the initially spent building it. Therefore after I paid said initial price the car would be mine to do whatever I please with. If I want to sell it on, destroy it, keep it forever and add to my collection, it is might right to have a choice in what I do with it as it now belongs to me. 

This logic is the same for the likes of books, dvds, furniture and damn near everything that you can physically buy. There are many places that have made businesses out of selling used goods, look at Gamestop, Love Film (renting by post, not the online version), used car lots, Blockbuster (not sure if they are in business anymore but you get my point), charity shops, eBay and the list goes on, that's just a few off the top of my head. But if you stop used goods from being sold you will destroy many businesses and cause job loses for even more people, which is exactly what we need right now (going to stop here or I will get in to a rant about politics and I can't be arsed with it). The fact of the matter is this does not happen in any other industry why should the gaming industry be the exception.

No comments:

Post a Comment