{"id":884,"date":"2010-09-11T17:55:37","date_gmt":"2010-09-11T22:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=884"},"modified":"2013-12-12T21:21:09","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T02:21:09","slug":"used-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=884","title":{"rendered":"Used Video Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

Penny Arcade drew attention to the fighting words of one game developer<\/a>, who will explicitly not support used games from joining in multiplayer mode<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Controversy ensues.<\/p>\n

Myself, I’m more than a little torn on the issue. On the one hand, I naturally rebel against a company trying to lock down content that I’m going to pay for (not that that’s a concern with this specific case of a wrestling game). Being able to own something and resell it has been a long-standing property right, whether it’s a car, air conditioner*, book, or video game. Who is this greedy corporation to arbitrarily decide to degrade the product\/service you paid for, just because you sold it on to someone else? Indeed, if it wasn’t for Blizzard making StarCraft2 impossible to transfer to a new account, my SC2 woes<\/a> would have been solved in a trivial way. Heck, even if you twist it so that instead of “buying” a game, you “license” or “lease” one, in the real world even licensees and leasees can often assign or sublet.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I do want to support the ability of people to come together to trade money for stuff in ways that work for them. And digital delivery is going to<\/del> may <\/em>require a different playbook than we’re familiar with from physical media. <\/p>\n

Where I get caught up though, is when companies try to charge the same for less. If I can ordinarily share my games with friends when I’m done with them, or sell them used for $10, then this crippled version of the game should cost less up front because it is in fact an inferior product<\/em>. Likewise with ebooks: there’s no reason in my mind for them to cost nearly as much as a paperback, and that’s from my point of view of receiving value, not even taking into account their lowered distribution\/publishing costs side of things. So when these companies say that they don’t care about used buyers because they don’t (directly) see any of the money from the used transaction, I have to step up and say that they did <\/em>get money from the used buyer, and they got it up front: the first buyer paid $50 for their own use of the game, and another $10 that they hope to get from the used buyer down the road.<\/p>\n

* – incidentally, I’m still trying to sell my wall\/slot air conditioner. If you’re London and want a used air conditioner for a wall slot (typically found in highrise apartments) send me an email!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Penny Arcade drew attention to the fighting words of one game developer, who will explicitly not support used games from joining in multiplayer mode. Controversy ensues. Myself, I’m more than a little torn on the issue. On the one hand, I naturally rebel against a company trying to lock down content that I’m going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}