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?"
not about piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
an additional six billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, they could make an additional six billion by creating games people actually want to play in the first place.
Won't Bother (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
It won't handle that situation, because it's exactly the one they're really trying to stop. Illicit copying on consoles is a lot more difficult than PCs; it's always possible, but you're cutting out a big chunk of the potential copying going on if it requires a soldering iron to get it done. Publishers can afford to completely ignore illicit copying on consoles.
However, they can use "piracy" as a rallying cry to put in measures to kill the used game market.
Silly question. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Simple: it will not be allowed.
You *really* think that they'd all the used market to exist if they had a choice?
Read this [bruceongames.com] for an idea of what the game publishers think about the used market. (Yes, the guy is an obvious shill.)
The big problem with these numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not about piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is about stopping used games sales, nothing more, nothing less
No, there's more to it than that. It's also about adding an extra level of complexity to your purchase and guaranteeing that yet another thing could go wrong with your already insanely expensive purchase. If the industry is looking to profit $6 billion dollars from this move, I can almost assure you that it's going to be about $6 billion in annoyance to the consumer. For some reason treating your customer like a criminal from square one is the latest rage these days.
Another link in a long chain. (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what they already do? I remember the original Xbox had a challenge response function signed with 2048bit RSA specifically designed to verify if the game was legitimate (regardless of homebrew implications). I fail to see how this generates anything except another spot for something to go wrong (ever have the cashier forget to give you change? Now have him forget to activate your $60 game).
Honestly, the best thing to combat piracy is to release better quality games. I'm looking at you EA (a.k.a. carbon copy gaming).
Crazy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
These people really are insane. They wont be happy until they can charge us every time an IP protected thought crosses our brain. The idea that IP is charged 'per brain' as it were, is slowly coming to be. No more sharing with friends, that would be illegal!
Re:not about piracy (Score:1, Insightful)
Except that this doesn't have anything to do with used game sales unless your "used" games fell off a truck somewhere. Once the disc's activated it's activated, and that's that.
This solves nothing until ... (Score:5, Insightful)
How will this work for people who don't have high (Score:4, Insightful)
How will this work for people who don't have high speed internet? None of today DVDs, Blu-ray players, xboxs, ps3 have dial up and for some people that is all they can get.
will they have to use usb keys that act as Dongles?
Big retailers won't stand for it (Score:5, Insightful)
The big retailers won't stand for the slowdown at checkout this would cause. Various schemes like this have been proposed before, and Wal-Mart isn't interested.
If everybody who wants activation at checkout, from cell phones to gift cards to videos, gets together and standardizes on a system, maybe.
Re:not about piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one wonders how the game industry still manage to make money. I buy all games legally in hope that they will keep on producing them.
Take Crysis for instance, I bought both releases and like anybody, after a while, I got tired of playing the AI versions of the game and moved to online "Crysis Wars" which I have been playing on-line for hours. The time spent on Crysis Wars is at least an order of magnitude greater that the time I have spent playing the AI versions and there is no recursive cost involved ! My investment has performed in a way so it might have cost me maybe on average 0.01$ an hour to play with the given product.
Have you ever coded any games ? Do you know how long it takes ? Do you know that it is impossible to release something like Crysis with only a handful of developers ?
I find that the money I gave them was a cheap price to pay ;-) Before piracy on a large scale, I could have agreed with you that some gaming companies might have charged to much for their products. This time is over, companies have to provide more competitive prices for people to actually buy the product instead of just opting for the pirated version.
Additionally, it doesn't matter what measures are put in place, there will always be cracked versions available.
Finally, I view this issue in a different way than the one about music rights for instance, because of the colossal amount of work required to release the final product :
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1273015&cid=28371645 [slashdot.org]
No more right of first sale (Score:5, Insightful)
The value of things (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize my perspective on what the value of something is might be a little strange, but I hold that it is quite logical.
I don't buy diamonds primarily because of the blood and scandal associated with them, but also because of the resale value problem. "Used diamonds" sell for SIGNIFICANTLY less than "New diamonds." Why is that? The real and true value of diamonds must be closer to that of used diamonds than that of new. I also don't buy "new cars" for the same reason. There is a huge loss in price between the two states of new and used and it's not equal to or less than the value of the use I get from it in my opinion. Therefore new cars represent a big waste of money and is a bad investment... same as diamonds.
How does this reflect on the topic? Simple. This "activated at POS" notion serves only to limit or kill the resale potential for a single title. They seek to control not only the copyright, but also the access to the media. And without the possibility of being able to resell the games or music or movies one has purchased, you are looking at an even greater disparity between the first sale price and the resale value. When they decide a title is no longer available or eligible for activation, the owner's purchase becomes completely worthless. (And let's say a game activation was tied to an XBOX Live or similar account system and for whatever reason, the XBOX Live account is no longer available and the same person needs to create another account... will he be able to take his game activations over to the new account? I DOUBT IT. This could mean the loss of several hundred or possibly more than thousands of dollars of first owner cost at the discretion of the policy of the hosts of the accounts used to manage activations.) This is a step worse than the "DRM nightmares" that people have encountered when DRM content providers shut down servers or their servers fail or their data is somehow lost or corrupted resulting in the loss of access to content that the user legally paid for.
This is yet another way in which the public domain becomes a casualty of the greed of copyrighted content owners. We seriously need to crank up the volume when it comes to expressing the loss of the public domain to legislators. Large parts of our history and culture have been lost forever already due to the way copyright is abusing the public's good faith. (Yes, I said good faith because MOST consumers don't infringe on copyrights... MOST don't have a clue as to how they can even do it.)
Resale market (Score:4, Insightful)
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?"
If I understand their reasoning correctly, that's part of the piracy they're trying to stop.
That's the useful part about calling coypright infringement piracy instead of copyright infringement: It has no real meaning, so it means whatever they want it to mean.
It's about killing the Pre-release (Score:5, Insightful)
On the subject of the used market, publishers will be shooting themselves in the feet if they want to go ahead with killing the used market. It's estimated that a substantial number of new game buyers partially fund their games buying through trading in their old titles. So the loss of the used market will more than likely have a negative effect on new sales close to the value of
I think that peple need to realize that there is simply not an infinite amount of money in the ecconomy and that somwhere you reach a point where no more sales can be made until more cash flows back to the pockets of your customers. However, if you keep the money moving around fast enough, it can seem like there's an infinite amount of it.
Re:not about piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you ever coded any games ? Do you know how long it takes ?
Depends on the game but not always that long. What takes longer is designing levels, artwork, playability, testing, music and all the other stuff.
Do you know that it is impossible to release something like Crysis with only a handful of developers ?
Impossible? Maybe for you. Game companies spend more time and effort these days on making it look & sound pretty than making it fun.
Music and cut scenes are not an essential part of a game. They're a way to promote games for use in shops & adverts.
Valve: 190+ employees
id Software: 105 employees
Not so many when you consider testers, marketing and all the other crap they add into games these days.
If games cost $10-20 each instead of 40-60 more people would buy them and they might actually keep them rather than selling them on
ebay/craigslist to get enough money for the next game. The price of games is far too high when you consider most are designed with
about 40 hours of gameplay in mind. When Valve's reduced Left4Dead they saw massive increases in sales (bigger than the original release).
* 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
* 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
* 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
* 75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
Re:Just nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true, all these measures do is make the product available through copyright infringement better than that if you give them your money.
Re:The value of things (Score:4, Insightful)
There is some factors into the price difference between new an used cars other then perception. A diamond, after, does not age, any defects are readily visible to a jeweler that knows what he is doing etc. A car has hundreds of different factors that affect it's condition and life. A new car is in a more or less known state ("lemons" that are defective from the factory aside). A used car, even if it is only just a few years old, has an unknown history. How well the car was maintained by the previous owner, any possible accidents that could have caused hidden damage, a long history of service problems, etc. There's a lack of information. What you do know, is the previous owner sold the car for a reason. That reason could be mundane, like they got a raise or new position and wanted a better car, they moved or can no longer afford it, or it could be because the car is a piece of shit and they are tired of it. Even a skilled mechanic cannot fully access the state of the car without a lot of expensive labor costs. Information has value, and there is more information about the new car then the used car, so that in part accounts for the difference in value when you drive it off the lot. There are of course other factors, a big one being the "cool" factor, the fact noone else's smelly butt has been in your drivers seat, warranties, etc.
Re:Just nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
They will just lump those into the piracy bucket and whine more.
Re:not about piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Except we don't believe that's what they are actually planning, to be able to really "unlock" a disc it has to either be part writeable (it has to work with existing drives) with the last bit being written at the counter, or has to come with a dongle. These are just not a realistic solution. So we assume that they will actually unlock the disc ID by sending it to gestapo headquarters, which will then let you perform online activation at home on your console ... which may or may not tie the software to your machine (depending on the whim of the developer).
It's almost certainly an online activation scheme and not an actual physical unlock.
Re:not about piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Sony (PSP Go), Nintendo (DSi), and Microsoft (360 downloads of retail games) are all working on download services for their AAA titles. Considering the margins they make on downloaded titles, I'd be surprised if they weren't about stopping all retail game sales.
Re:not about piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
It's probably very similar to the 'lost revenue' theory that's thrown at piracy I think. They're probably looking at the used video game market and counting every sale as a 'loss'. By forcing activations they eliminate that sale/market. So therefore 'of course' every used-game sale (where the creator gets $0 additional profits) would actually be a new, retail unit sale (thus generating profit).
Software/game makers are really getting out of hand. They're right behind the MAFIAA in scumbag-ness. Trying to eek out a few more sales by taking away what few things aren't yet 'illegal' in the software market.
off topic - some of the used game resellers really are getting obnoxious with their pricing. On a newly released game you're lucky to get 50% back and then they sell it for $55 instead of $60. $25 net profit on a $60 item is awfully high. I have zero sympathy for these companies and their retarded profit margins but kids (people) still should be able to borrow or sell games.
Re:not about piracy (Score:5, Insightful)