There has been some grumbling for awhile now from game developers that they don’t get any benefit from 2nd hand game sales. EA started the ball rolling by saying that it would charge $10 to 2nd hand game owners who wanted to play the game online, and they have quickly been followed by THQ, Ubisoft and Activision all supporting the idea.
Now Sony themselves have jumped on board and said that they support the idea of charging 2nd hand game owners a fee to play online.
Personally I can’t believe what these companies are saying. They feel that they have a right to make money of the 2nd hand market. What product developer in the world get’s any part of the 2nd hand market of their product. Please if you know put your answers on a S.A.S.E. and send them to me, because I can’t think of any.
I don’t understand the rational behind them thinking that they are entitled to more money, just because a new person is playing the game. Once the original owner no longer has the game it’s not like they can still access any of the online game play. If they could then I could understand the developers wanting some remuneration. It seems to me that they want to be paid over and over for the same product.
This is the biggest threat the online gaming community has ever seen. And could cause a real rift between developers and gamers. Here’s hoping that common sense or maybe some legal block will stop these companies going down this route. Please Microsoft, take a stand against it. Don’t let this happen on the Xbox.
I’ve just been thinking about how the game developers would be practically able to do this. And the only way that I can see it working is that each game would have to have some kind of unique serial number embedded in the code. That would have to be logged on their servers against your user id or games console (otherwise other people playing on your console wouldn’t be able to use it.) So they would be storing our personal info on their servers. And seeing as a lot of console owners are legally underage so even if they tick the agree box it still wouldn’t be legal. Just a thought.
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