GameStop Used Game Lawsuit

A lawsuit has been filed in the Northern District of California against GameStop, citing deceptive practices relating to used game sales. IGN has details on the suit, which stems from a customer buying a used copy of Dragon Age: Origins with the belief that additional DLC was available for free based on the cover blurb. Of course this DLC is part of the new trend intended to impede used-game sales, which the customer learned when they tried to get the DLC, which set them back an additional $15.00, making their final purchase price for the used game $10.00 more than the cost of a brand-new copy (that sound you hear is EA execs exchanging high-fives). IGN has a copy of the complaint in Adobe Acrobat-format, and an article on this on Gamasutra offers thoughts from an analyst saying that GameStop will probably be able to remedy this problem by affixing stickers to used games clarifying DLC availability.
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Re: The used game market is just capitalism at work.
Mar 27, 2010, 00:27
84.
Re: The used game market is just capitalism at work. Mar 27, 2010, 00:27
Mar 27, 2010, 00:27
 
If I buy a book or DVD, I can resell it no problem, but in the case of this PC game, I am prevented from reselling by the publisher. Is there a right to resell something you buy?

From my perspective, there is no difference between "used" game and "used" movies. However, the movie industry has a primary market in movie theaters and a secondary market through licensing agreements with television. They're in a much better position to absorb missed sales from used DVD trade. By the time it gets to that point, it's all gravy. Does that make it okay? No, not in my book. But I don't think it's going to lead to any radical shifts in how movies get made. Games don't get that luxury. They've got one market for recovering the money required to make them. Can that change? Sure, but it's not likely to change without fundamentally changing how games are made now. And frankly, I like games now and really don't want to see their development change in response to the business of making money rather than change in ways to make better games.

Books are a bit different. It doesn't require hundreds of people and millions of dollars to write a book like it does for a movie or video game. However, it does require quite a bit of money to print a book. Proportionally, it's more expensive to create and distribute the physical book than it is to conceive and create the narrative word. So there is an inherit value in owning a physical book. Even when a book is available for free, on the internet, there is a market for having that written word in a physical format. Books degrade over time. They get torn or dropped in the bath tub. There's a reason to want a new book over a used book, especially of the difference in price is nominal and that used book is really used.

I find the "used" game market to be more financially impactful of game sales and the business of games than outright piracy. That's a potential consumer who has money, is willing to spend it on a game they want to play, but are ignorant of where their money is actually going and what impact that has. But, on a personal level...I get it and I don't hold any animosity towards someone who buys "used". My animosity is towards the people who sell "used" games, because in reality what they're doing is re-distributing a game in a way that ensures no money is going back to the people who make that game.

Someone who illegally distrubutes copies of a game or someone who freely downloads a game is much more personally insulting to me as a developer. It's the giant fat middle finger of "your game is good enough for me to want to play, but I'm too damn cheap to want to give you any money for it" that I find infuriating. The insinuation that whatever you do to earn money, your $50 is more valuable than the years of hundreds of people's lives, hard work, sweat, and tears that went into making it. As the creators of games, I feel it should be our unquestionable right to decide who does and who does not get to play what we've worked so hard to make. And the requirements for it are pretty simple and straightforward. Pay us. Pay us so that we can justify doing what we do and can continue to make games for people to play.
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