Study Claims Point-of-Sale Activation Could Generate Billions In Revenue 140
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Soulskill
from the only-where-consumer-rage-is-a-valid-currency dept.
from the only-where-consumer-rage-is-a-valid-currency dept.
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:1, Interesting)
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.
Unless the activation is tied to your (mandatory) account, like Steam [steampowered.com].
It must require an internet connection for activation anyway, otherwise how does this differ from an activation code included in the box?
Can't play it offline? Tough.
Re:not about piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
That's not their goal. They don't specifically want to give their customers headaches, because unless they're invested in asprin manufacturing, creating headaches doesn't get them any more money.
Rather, they take a problem that's affecting their bottom line (real or perceived) and come up with a ham-fisted solution. The actual motivation is nothing more than the OP said (eliminate the used market).
piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:not about piracy (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, unless it's tied to an account. Which it isn't. RTFA.
Yeah, I RTFA. It doesn't specifically say anything about not being tied to an account either.
And since you must connect to the internet to activate the game anyway, then that's the next logical step.
Otherwise, you didn't answer the question of how this differs from an activation code included in the box.
Remember, regardless of what they say, the whole purpose of this "activation" scheme is to kill the used game market.
Re:This solves nothing until ... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's that term again. "Reason to buy." Why would a publisher want to do that? Isn't it better to make the game, then complain about being entitled to money without providing any reason. Clearly, treating all your customers as criminals is the answer.
Yes, instead of treating the people who legitimately buy things as what they are, Paying customers who as the saying goes, "are always right", let's just the assume the people who are buying the thing are the ones that are going to pirate it. That makes perfect sense.
Re:not about piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Problem is that the game prices are so high that preventing used sales, might effect new game sales hugely in a negative way!
Simply if you cannot sell the game anymore you think twice even buying it new. I am rather sure it will backfire big time!
Re:Big retailers won't stand for it (Score:4, Interesting)
This is currently how pre-paid cell phone cards and lottery tickets are sold.
You buy the card, for example a $20 Virgin Mobile card at Target, and during the checkout process, the cashier takes your money and scans the card. The number from the card is sent to Virgin as "enabled". This allows Target and Virgin to not worry about anyone stealing a rack full of phone cards as only "enabled" cards are allowed to be used to add minutes to your cell phone.
Entertainment MERCHANTS, not Publishers (Score:3, Interesting)
This study was published by the Entertainment Merchants Association, which is a trade group for the retailers who sell and rent games. The members are companies like Toys R Us, Blockbuster, Target, etc. All the posts here read like the publishers are the ones sponsoring this study- eg this is the publishers trying to kill used sales.
I'm not convinced that is the motivation given that the merchants are the primary beneficiaries of used sales. For merchants, in store theft is a huge issue, and I imagine it was a primary motivation for at least starting this study on POS activation.
These guys are looking to a future where downloaded games reduce the need for physical retailers, and I'm sure they are scrambling to ensure their place in the world through whatever means necessary- including some dumb ideas like POS activation.
Re:The value of things (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, and from a purely financial point of view the calculation is actually easy:
If you used to resell your games after a few weeks at half price (just an example), you would get to play them "effectively" at half of the first sale price for a while. Adjust this number for your actual buying and selling habits.
Enter activation, and lets make the worst case assumption that your console will break someday and the games won't run on the replacement console/next model. Now you also get to play the games "for a while", but at full first sale price.
Consequence: ;-)
If you as user don't want to pay more for your games, you'll have to switch to buying only older games that are no longer in the full price category. This also means that the publisher makes the sale half a year (or more) later.
I wonder how the industry will like it if people do that
In related news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's about killing the Pre-release (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe there has been talk in the past of not including a main game executable on the disk and only copies that have been activated at checkout will be able to download it.
Yeah, Sony is starting to roll this out. Patapon 2 is a download only title, which means that if you buy it at Gamestop, the box only contains a little code that you type in to download at home. So you need to buy your own media (a memory stick) to hold their software on it. It takes up about a third of mine.
Sony allows you to download a product you buy a total of five times (or at least they used to, I haven't looked recently), which means that you don't really own the software at all. But then again, we've been trained that way by Microsoft and all the other big companies with their activation schemes (I had to call Microsoft to explain why I'd activated my copy of Office 5 times - every time my lemon of a laptop broke and I took it in for warranty they gave me a loaner - 6 activations in as many months).
Personally, I think that if you do indeed have a license (as the music and software people claim), and don't actually own your copy of the software, then they should be obligated to provide you with a copy if you lose it, since the license means you have a right to enjoy it for your own personal benefit as long as you like. A law stating this would do the trick nicely.