Study Claims Point-of-Sale Activation Could Generate Billions In Revenue 140
Late last year we discussed news that the Entertainment Merchants Association was pondering a plan to develop technology that requires games and movies to be "activated" when they are sold at retail outlets, primarily to reduce theft and piracy. Now, the EMA claims a study they commissioned has indicated that employing such a system for video games, DVDs, and Blu-ray products would generate an additional $6 billion in revenues each year. Critics of the idea are skeptical about the numbers, pointing out that the majority of game piracy comes from downloading PC games, which this plan won't even affect. There are other problems as well: "In order for benefit denial to work, the EMA would presumably require the three major consoles to have some sort of activation verification function to ensure that games were legally purchased. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft agree to that. There is also a lucrative market for used video games to consider. After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?"
Re:not about piracy (Score:0, Funny)
You are probably correct.
The revenue lost to game aftermarket is huge.
For example, I bought a sleep numbers bed because I like to rock my girlfriend's tight pussy on a bed you could bounce a quarter off of, but I prefer to sleep on a very soft, downy mattress once I'm done with the bitch. Problem solved.
Re:not about piracy (Score:5, Funny)
You know... (Score:3, Funny)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The only real thing that needs to happen to completely lock down physical media on consoles is for a small portion of the disc to be writeable, and require retailers to write that with a specialized burner on purchase, containing all pertinent information including console serial number, date of purchase, place of purchase, etc etc. Encode/burn it in a way otherwise unreadable by normal players (like the Dreamcast's GD-ROM format, which was, to grossly over-simplify, more or less an inversion of the expected TOC with the data written backwards), give the console(s) in question the ability to read and require that track via firmware, and you have a completely locked-down, no-resale system that's directly tied to your console and your console alone. Charge an extra 50% per disc for "unlocked" versions to be used solely at video rental stores, perhaps with a re-writeable layer containing a date string to lock the game once the due-back date arrives.
Sure, it'd cost an arm and a leg and the soul of your first-born son, but who cares? You're saving yourself from PIRATES. Plus, you get all the benefits of the online distribution racket, too - Your friend wants to play? They need to get their own copy! You lost your disc? Buy another one, just like people who lost their accounts do! Console broke? Well, buy a new one and buy all your games again! Best of all, no pesky internet connection required to verify the license. That's a plus for the consumer!
Sure, you might be able to get around it, but good luck with that.
Re:The value of things (Score:3, Funny)
All that sounds great. But when you buy a car and sell it even 6 months later, you will not get a "new car" price from it. There is a generally accepted drop in value the moment you drive it off the lot. Hrm... gives me an idea for the next time I feel like jacking around with a car salesman -- ask them about that value drop and then ask them to discount the price of the car by that much so that I don't have to suffer a loss immediately after buying it. From the moment you buy a new car, you are "upside down."