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Conventional “wisdom” says consoles are a land of milk, honey, and Firefly never being canceled while PC is a piracy ridden hive of scum and villainy. And let's not dance around the facts here: we'd all be a lot better off if pirates took a cue from Fable III and traded in their horns for halos. That said, the game's lead combat designer isn't convinced that consoles are any better off.
"Piracy these days on PC is probably less problematic than second-hand sales on the Xbox," lead Fable III combat designer Mike West told Eurogamer. "I've been working on PC games for many years and piracy is always a problem. There are a lot of honest people out there as well, and if they like your game they'll buy it.”
"It's just a depressing situation we're in that people don't think it's worth spending money on computer games," he added. "Unless you sit down and meet a pirate face to face and have a conversation about what it does, I don't think anything will stop them."
West, then, may not be waving a pirate flag and cheering every time someone figuratively picks his pocket, but he's a realist. Piracy's simply unavoidable, and good games – by and large – are able to succeed in spite of it. That, however, isn't the case with the second-hand market, which sees retailers scampering off with every last cent of each used sale.
"For us it's probably a no-lose even with piracy as it is," said West. "But, as I say, second-hand sales cost us more in the long-run than piracy these days."
Granted, second-hand sales are also a reality of a free-market economy. That retailers like GameStop are taking advantage of that fact at developers' expense is – while in many ways regrettable – certainly not wrong in itself. So long as consumers want that option, it'll be there. Publishers, meanwhile, have tried to give the system the business equivalent of a nice, polite middle finger with initiatives like EA's Project Ten Dollar. So yeah, “sticky situation” doesn't even begin to describe it.
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angryreddwarf
May 20, 2011 at 4:00pm
funny how all the corporations that are ripping US off, want us to feel guilty about piracy
Ghok
May 20, 2011 at 1:44pm
Ha. Next thing we'll hear about about publishers coming up with a way to stop gamers having friends over and playing your games.
Publishers should focus on making people want to keep their games instead of selling them off to the next person. This kind of crap is something gamers get tired of, and we have other things we can spend our money on. It's absolutly ridiculous when I install a game on Steam, then find out it has additional DRM on it that installs to my computer.
There's nothing wrong with re-selling games. Trust me, I WISH I could resell some of the impulse buys I've made on Steam.
Carpnter
May 20, 2011 at 12:28pm
If they don't want people trading in their console games they need to provide more than 12 hours of playtime. Some of the recent games I've purchased have relatively short playtimes and I am not someone to replay a game through a second time. The need to release new content for them (even if the new content costs 400 or 800 microsoft points. EA got something right with Mass Effect 2, they have released some new content for them and kept people interested in the game. Of course doing all the quests you had a significant amount of playtime as well.
aarcane
May 20, 2011 at 9:52pm
That's what I love about older Final Fantasy games. They last for freakin' ever!! New RPGs have like half a day and it's done. bought a spyro game for the GBA back when GBA games were still new. beat it the same day, <6 hours. was sad. wasn't as much fun as it was when I was a kid :(
whathuhitwasntme
May 20, 2011 at 8:47am
When I sell my old chevy car does gm expect me to send them a commission? yeah they built the car 20 years ago, but they did not sell it this time. It's mine. I can sell or not sell it as I see fit. I do not understand why software developers feel that they are entitled to more money on a second selling of this product.
again, that would be like general mills expecting a bread company to send them a second payment for the flour they made bread out of, because they sold it to them.
If the software company feels it needs to control the after market of their product, America is a free market economy. You can open up your own versions of GameStop and buy,sell, and trade used crap to.
Corporate America, WAKE UP, while you may own the souls of the collective trashbin known as Washington,D.C. you do not own mine. I owe you nothing beyond the purchase price of anything I choose to consume. Welcome to America, how much more can I pay.
bling581
May 20, 2011 at 9:56am
They're figuring it as a loss because if there was no secondhand game sales then the person purchasing the used copy would have had to buy it brand new in the store. Of course they don't expect a cut from used game sales, don't be ridiculous.
aarcane
May 20, 2011 at 12:02pm
If the game I want for a console isn't available used, I almost always walk away. Your logic is broken.
bling581
May 24, 2011 at 10:09am
No you just dont' get it. I'm not talking about what YOU do or what the majority of people probably do. The key word in my post is "assuming". Obviously if you're intending to buy a title used then you're going to walk out of the store if it's not available. Some gaming companies are trying to make it impossible to resell games because then you'd be forced to buy it brand new. It's just another typical example of a company producing figures that can't be proven in order to try and prove a point.
jgottberg
May 20, 2011 at 9:01am
I couldn't agree more.
I rarely if ever trade my old games in or sell them but if I do, it's not like I'm EVER going to sell or trade them for a profit anyways. If I paid my $60 for a new game and trade it and get raped for the value at $15, is the developer going to cover my losses? No.
They should be freakin estatic about the process. More than likely, when I trade or sell that game, I'm using the dough to buy yet another game. Geesh.
jgottberg
May 20, 2011 at 8:45am
Someone HAD to buy the game new for it to be available to purchase used. I don't see why software developers are complaining. If someone cares enough to buy it used, it's still keeping the software developer relevant isn't it? By allowing a kid (or grown up) a chance to buy the used copy, wouldn't it stand to reason that if the person that bought it liked it, they would buy a new copy of a game from that developer when they have the money to buy it new?
I haven't bought a new car in years. I buy used. I save money that way... Do car companies bitch and moan about people buying used cars?
penskeford
May 20, 2011 at 8:34am
At upwards of 50 bucks a game, and many times, like in the case of crysis 2, you try to update the game with a patch and it can't even find it's own directory, people get frustrated. Or, you format your drive or upgrade your mobo and it won't re-activate. They just can't seem to get anything right, yet at the same time want us to pay north of half a c-note for a game and whatever they touted in their trailers aren't actually part of the game on it's final release pisses people off. I gladly payed for Mass Effect 2, but alot of the other games out there, whether it be publishers, developers or good ole microsoft games for windows live that never worked for crap is what really drags the industry down. I just have a hard time feeling sorry for these guys.
stradric
May 20, 2011 at 6:37am
The software industry did this to themselves. They want software-as-a-license but then give us consoles that require us to purchase physical media where the license and the media are the same. Of course when you package it like that, people are going to resell it when they are done with it. That's the model that they chose so I can't help but find these complaints rather empty.
The software-as-a-license is enforced on the PC with things like Steam and Battle.net or the other game distribution sites. And yet PC gamers are clamoring for titles that cater specifically to the PC, but the developers haven't been answering by and large.
meekbarbarian
May 20, 2011 at 6:16am
The big problem with dev's complaining about the second hand market is that they shoot themselves in the foot. A lot of people who buy the game new do so BECAUSE they know they can trade it back in. Get rid of that option, and those $50-$60 price points become less appealing, meaning less initial sales.
The creation of a seconhand market almost always improves the initial market - it just doesn't improve it directly for the the dev's. It's like no one at these companies took Economics 101, where the rest of us on the planet found this idea obvious.
The only thing the dev's should complain about is that they didn't meet the markets needs on their own. If they would have created some sort of trade in system themselves before Gamestop/Amazon/etc did, then not only would they have made money off of the initial sale, they could have generated goodwill among gamers and developed even more brand loyalty while also having the chance to upsale new games on the people shopping via them for used games.
aarcane
May 20, 2011 at 1:11am
As a relatively young user who grew up durring the dawning of the gaming and PC age, I used to pirate alot. I had illegal windows, Illegal games, Illegal Music, Movies, and ROMs. and oyu know what? When I learned about better alternatives to piracy, I migrated away from it. But in many cases, you find yourself in a no-win situation. Want to play original "Legend of Zelda: A link to the past" without the douchiness of the GBA remake? good luck finding an original cartridge for sale, let alone brand-new-money-goes-to-the-developer condition. the only option is to "Illegally" download a ROM. Same with many outdated games. DooM I and DooM II were that way for many years, your only option was to warez them. then, when the tail end of the DooM community died out with Half-Life, ID started selling DooM again. I bought it right away. one of my first few legitimate game purchases, right when I started having a gaming budget. I copied the WAD files off the CD and overwrote my warezed WADs, and w00t, I was legit! It felt good.
Ever since, I've sworn up and down to buy anything I play that's worth it, and shortly after, I swore never to install a warezed OS again either. I switched to Linux. Between Wine and emulators, most everything I wanted was present. I was free of the Illegitimate OS that was Overpriced out of my range for many years. Turns out that while most games don't run on wine.. those that do perform better on Linux than they do on Windows, and are often more stable. Those with native linux ports are even better!
Shortly after, game prices shot up toward the $40 pricepoint. I couldn't buy anything even moderately new. So I didn't try. I just lagged behind the curve instead.
but you know what I found out? All those songs you can listen to for free any time you want? There's no open source replacement for that. Nor those movies that get delivered regularly to your house free of charge... So I'd download my favorite ones because I couldn't afford the video capture card, and the MP3s were simpler to manage than the radio rips. mainly because they had tags. I've still not found a way to replace the simplicity of downloading an artist discography. I've had a few bad experiences with both amazon and ebay trying to get original disks, but when I can pick up the FLAC version on <insert torrent site here> and pick up the CDs one by one as they come in at my local music store as people slowly sell them off, or the international orders I place come in one every six months, I pick up the CDs and DVDs of my favorite movies and music, and re-rip those that I could only find in low quality.
The story of the moral is this: It's easy to believe that piracy in it's simplest form is wrong, but in the end, it's usually not hurting anyone. The people who pirate stuff are usually buying used, or not at all when not pirating, and it costs developers and artists nothing extra.
TommM
May 19, 2011 at 9:09pm
Well, it's an interesting argument. First of all, I am hard-core anti-piracy. It boggles my mind that a person who never in a million years would think of stealing even a piece of penny candy out of a store, but willingly and frequently steals software, music and movies over the Internet without a second thought. That's what the anonimity, and the ease of stealing over the Internet does. It's a "faceless" crime. No foul, no harm, right? At least to the thief. But those of us who don't participate in online theft can look at it and see the harm it does.
On the other hand, once I've bought a product, I feel I'm free to do with it what I want. You sell used cars, used clothing, used furniture, used dishes, used books - pretty much everything else you originally purchased new, right? And there are no qualms about that. Drive by any neighborhood on a Saturday morning and you'll see exactly that going on with yard sales. So how come "all of a sudden" that doesn't apply to used computer games, music or movies? Sorry, I'm not convinced that media is any different than any other product. If I paid full price for an item, once it's in my possession, I'm free to do what I want with it as far as I'm concerned.
aarcane
May 20, 2011 at 1:17am
the problem with analogizing piracy to traditional theft is that traditional theft is the act of depriving another individual of something. This works even to a degree with "patents" in the traditional sense, at least up until their abuse with software. To steal something, the person who had it before you has to not have it now. This isn't the case with Piracy. You, Who would probably NOT have paid for the software/music/video in question and would instead have done without have made a copy of the original, leaving the original in tact to be summarily sold for revenue, smashed in a meat grinder, or otherwise used by the original owner. Similar to taking a photo of the Mona Lisa, many of which exist. You could argue that the mona lisa is in the public domain because the copyright has expired, but people still own it and profit from it, so it's a moot point. you couldn't walk up and take it physically to hang on your wall.
chart2006
May 19, 2011 at 10:12pm
I entirely agree which is why I hardly do any PC gaming anymore. When I buy a game or software it just pisses me off that I can't sell it to my buddy when I'm done. Now do I think it is right that Game Stop buys a used copy for $10 and then sells it for $29.98 to make a profit off of it no I don't. If you sell a piece of software that you bought then the resale price should be less than the purchase price. If a profit was made then a percentage of those profits should go back to the developers. Still yet I should be allowed to sell or give my copy of COD:MW2 to my father-in-law if I wanted to but can't. If there is one industry that I think needs a good swift kick in the nuts It's the software industry. They are all greedy bastards anyway. Personally I think Steve Jobs deserves many shots to the nuts and I would be first in line to do it. Maybe he will have a heart attack by the 2nd shot. It's people like him who inhibit advancement and competition. When a smaller company wants to compete he just finds someway to sue the crap out of them to get them to go away. Oh hey they have a tablet that charges let's sue them because we own the patent to charge a device without taking the battery out. One day China will surpass us because they don't have all the ridiculous laws we do. **Thank You for F.B. opt-in.
Joji
May 19, 2011 at 8:52pm
Your argument is valid, however, buying used games from EBgames/Gamestop can reduce the amount of materials needed to make the disc, plastic case, etc. Basically you're being a bit more environmentally friendly. However, you stated that the companies wouldn't get the sales, which is true.
So it's a 50/50. Would you rather be a bit eco-friendly or support the developers and actually buy the new ones?
Ultimately, I believe that buying digital copies is the best solution as they are usually on sale like you mentioned. Unfortunately, like all things, there are negative sides to digital copies, like not being able to use another account to be shared with, with your siblings, and so fourth.
The ultimate decision is you. You make the choice. :) Basically like that.
Holly Golightly
May 19, 2011 at 8:15pm
Wow, you know what... Com eto think about it, when I used to play console games as a child, I used to always get the used games. To me, a cartridge was a cartridge... Why pay more if it is the same exact thing? Now that I think about it... Companies never really got that money... And I feel somewhat guilty. But now that I have matured, and play on a much more mature platform. I do not think twice about buying a game now. If I want it, I will buy it because luckily for us PC Gamers, the games are sold at a much cheaper price, sometimes half the price, and we get more in return.
"Pay less, and get more."
With great sales like Steam Sales, Comrade Discounts, Gamers Gate Good Price, and Amazon's Amazing deals, we really can get the best price with the better performance. And you know what, the guys at Fable 3 are correct. 2nd hand sales are just as bad as priacy... If not worst.
