that would mean then , that you cant resell any EA games as you need a specific game account to play them.....
Another question for me, is that will this make the likes of Microsoft and Sony quake in their booties a little bit? The possible move to next gen digital download only titles for example, could mean that in the future this ruling could eventually apply to them also. This would in turn damage their attempts to bury the second hand market? Am I right in asking this, or am I a bit misinformed as to how far the legislation could extend?
Well considering online only was their safe haven from reselling... @adzc1987 DVD backups wouldn't make any difference as (I assume) when you would sell a Steam game (for example) it would no longer be part of your account, you're selling the licence not the data.
I suspect that the way Steam will cut down on people buying second-hand is by forcing a minimum price for the game, so it's almost equivalent to just buying it anyway. It does mean some foxy people can probably profit off the sales, but it would also mean that they're not likely to loose that much money.
No No i know, i just mean that there used to be a small print at the back of game manuals saying you may create a backup....but no details how!
That's because they can't say "NO BACKUPS!", but they can't tell you how, on grounds of being told off for "Encouraging Piracy." Which is absolute bollox in my opinion, but that's just me. It was worse when there used to be all the Copy-Protection that would whine and refuse to start the game if it detected Alcohol 120% or similar on the system. That was annoying as hell when I just wanted to play a game.
I foresee many games coming with "season passes" that is locked to you're account They sells games for cheap, allow 2nd hand market but make you buy a pass to actually play the game. So buy BF3 for $25 and are allowed to resell for whatever. But when you want to play multiplayer you have a buy a pass that only you can use for $10 for 3 months of play(something like this)
It will just push to a subscription based model for games, where the content (especially online) is useless without an account and purchased access time. This would be horrible.
I bet that you won't be able to game online with a second hand copy if they do force this through though.
MS or Sony might be worried a bit about their cut of games being sold, but I think it'll come down to the game developers for finding the tricks to make sure the money still comes in. As far as consoles go, there's already a second hand market with discs. If digital games also have to be resellable they aren't any worse off. The burden will fall on the developers and publishers to do stuff like: EA has already done something like this with their EA Sports games coming with a free multiplayer account pass, and any additional accounts costing $10 so if you bought the game used you'd still need to buy yourself an online pass. And to be fair, that wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't abused. The problem is that everyone here knows how quickly it'll be twisted into a money machine. Multiplayer content requires some continued input from developers so continued cash flow makes sense. But I don't doubt we'd be seeing full price $60 games which then require an additional $10~ to play online. (Plus $15 map pack, $10 re-skin pack, $30 premium account, etc. etc.) There's also the potential for free to play games to make a move. Steam has started adding more and more free to play games and developers like Crytek (iirc?) have been moving to AAA F2P games. If there's nothing to sell you have no worries about a second hand market. God help us all if this happens.
I don't really know what will happen, I just like the idea of being able to get rid of some games I no longer want, not thought about anymore then that
Especially when, with it being a digital version, it's just like buying it new anyway. Your not paying for a DVD case that's been kept in good condition, or a manual that's included and not ripped. I can see it's pretty good in theory, but I don't think it'll really work very well. One way could be, when you've got a game you want to sell on, you mark it that you want to sell it. And then if someone buys that game, just like they'd be buying any other game (not specifically buying someones second had copy), then you'd get a certain percentage of the sale, and the rest would go like in the sale of a new game. But, I suppose the retailers still won't like that much, as they'll most likely lose some money, depending on how much they give to the seller. And if that percentage is pretty small anyway, I would imagine most wouldn't bother selling the game. So maybe that's what they will do, and just make it so unprofitable and pointless to sell your game, that you don't bother, and everyone else keeps buying it new.
How about just being able to either gift your personal copy or transfer it to another account. That could also solve the "value" issue. What a game might be worth is agreed upon by the partaking parties.
And within seconds: "Bit-Tech Game Passing Thread!". Everyone interested in a game puts in their name. The purchase cost on Steam is divided amongst everyone interested and a line is formed for who gets to play it. Any reasonably tight-knit community could do this and it would crush sales of games.
To what extents? If you have just one friend you can cut the cost of a singleplayer game in half. Each pitch in half, first one plays it then passes on the game to the other to play. Simple. That's far more exploitable than anything currently. Take an online community and you get some inefficiencies because of trust issues but can pass a game for more than once. I'm not sure if you're talking about azrael's post of just passing games or my post of trading communities, but assuming it's to me I'm certain we'd see it here on Bit. Thinking about it some more having everyone pitch in wouln't work. Instead have everyone state their interest, the first person buys it at full price then sells it at full price minus one share. The second then sells it at another share and so on until eventually the game hits zero. The advantage is that if, say, the third person fails to pass they'll have paid quite a bit and everyone further down the line won't be out anything and can consider simply restarting the process.
