Does advocating for used games prevent going all digital?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with all the noise about the new consoles. But part of me thinks its really dumb that people got excited about Sonys announcement that it would allow used games and the sale of used games as long as developers allowed it.

I find that increasingly everything is just going into the direction of being completely digital anyway, so why fight this? Eventually all games will be downloaded and stored completely eliminating the practice of reselling or buying boxed copies of games. Why not get to that future sooner than later?

It's like when the US switched to digital broadcasting and forced everyone to either buy new TVs or get conversion boxes. Maybe all of us just need to get to being connected already.

We aren't there yet. The industry is not going full on digital anytime soon. Will digital be more and more of an option? Absolutely, but physical will always be an option even when it goes to niche territory. Music is still released on CDs, DVDs and blu-ray movies are still being sold and major games will continue to ship on discs and carts for the foreseeable future.

You might be ready for an all digital future but a lot of people aren't.

1. No one is arguing that it's not going to be all digital in the future, but why should we speed it along when there's still an obvious benefit to owning physical media (read: first-sale doctrine and the right to truly own the thing you have) and digital media ownerships rights still haven't been figured out in a way that doesn't negatively impact my rights as a consumer?
2. How does advocating for physical media in any way affect digital sales? Every retail game on the new system is going to be digital on day one anyway, so what does it matter if there's also a retail option? People who want to buy their games digitally will do so and people who don't want to will still buy games and everyone is happy and everyone wins. How does this become an argument where the people who are buying digitally are being negatively affected? Does the fact that I like buying vinyls devalue your iTunes download in some way?
3. It's incredibly disingenuous to compare this to the conversion to digital television signals considering that digital signals were the rule and not the exception when they forced people to buy the conversion boxes, whereas broadband penetration in America is still horrendously awful.

No, because they aren't advocating exclusively for used games.

There are a lot of issues with next generation's DRM that go beyond used games.

I am not a user of used games services, but I still have problems with the no borrowing allowed, not inclusive, always watching, always listening, always online piece of machinery.

And even as a non-user, I find preferential, monopolistic access to that service to be screwed up.

I really wish the internet would be just as vocal over this. Cable/Telcom companies make ridiculous amounts of cash for a pretty sub par product. The foot dragging to update and spread out any of the infrastructure is crazy... But whatevs... i'll leave you all back to your ms hate train.

"Used" is simply a term we apply to physical things that aren't still pristine from their manufactured state. It's the wrong term, really. Trading/reselling games is the actual issue, whether they are discs or digital, and Microsoft seems to be taking a good look at the possibilities there. Whether publishers agree it's feasible is all that matters, though.

Absolutely no technical issue prevents me from clicking on a Steam game I own, "Send to Inventory", and trading it away. The reason that feature doesn't exist yet is because the business agreements (and philosophy) to allow it are not established, because there is no ironclad assurance that I can't also keep the game offline. It's like selling music or movie collections after you've ripped them. That is indeed piracy, and people do/did it regularly.

Um, no it's not like that at all. Because you couldn't buy your TV signal in a paper box at a store and trade it with a friend after you watched a few shows. :) Your point I think is that there was a forced change, which sometimes needs to happen yes. But it does take a long time to mandate and always upsets people. Countless examples, including switching off original Xbox Live support. You should read this to understand how much the signal conversion cost the government.

This statement proves to me that you haven't come close to thinking about the issues enough. Network accessibility is not something we are born with. It demands infrastructure on a national and international scale, and it demands a level of wealth that not everyone has. We as a society are not there "already". You should talk to Al Gore about that. ;)

I feel like you are debating two big points on this matter. The first is quite simply the battle of control and how much control a consumer will have of the things they buy. This is a pricey hobby and having control of your things is a big deal to many. Music has came a long way and is still a very different beast when it comes to ownership of the products you buy. DVD and Blu rays may be closer to games and is still very open on what a consumers owns. Now video games is more expensive than both of those mediums so its understandable people will be upset when a rapid change in ownership rights is put to the table.

The second point i feel is many people claim that all digital is the future so why fight when if you think about the small details the systems themselves are not ready for this move. Sony has yet to prove that downloads and installs will be less of a hassle and that new metro store design has to go because it not very practical to use, pretty but not practical. Microsoft can not keep locking hard drives if they want an all digital future and not having an option to upgrade the hard drive itself seems weird for an all digital system. 500GB may seem like a lot now but if the new standard for next gen games is that every game will float around 20+ GB on disc than 500GB will fill up pretty fast. Also given Microsoft policies as i currently understand them if you are banned or out of region, may have the effect of prohibiting you from using or playing the games you have.

So its not a simple everyone wins so why fight it, there are quite a few issues where we as consumer lose or have less control over the things we buy.If we don't gain benefit of equal value than why would we not fight it I ask you? In the end sure we very well may go all digital but it should be on an evenly beneficial ground and not just to make companies more money.

Sony wants the same digital future, they're just doing it through communicating the convenience of digital purchasing and probably enticement through sales and such. Also bare in mind, i doubt the indies they are pushing are going to see disk releases so if they go heavy in that department then it'll result in the same "check in" process that all consoles currently do to manage the rights of digital content.

The problem is that of consumer ignorance and Microsoft's inability to alleviate our ignorances as to what benefits a forced online system can have. When we compare the idea of forced online to the current market, we foresee not being able to play our games because of either maintenance (or just system failure) on Microsoft's end, or maintenance from our ISPs. Things that are out of our control. It's up to Microsoft to create a system of checks that make sure everything runs smoothly and they haven't really explained how they are going to take care of these complex problems.

Advocating for "disk check" games reassures consumers that they won't lose control of their entertainment. Both companies have to find solutions to justify, and express, the convenience of digital to the point of overshadowing the inconvenience of having that system tethered to the internet.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes from both sides.

There's no point in rushing change. We're at a point where forcing this sort of thing locks a whole lot of people out from using this content. Not only that but they haven't come up with anything meaningful to make digital games as valuable as physical ones. This change will occur eventually, but currently the problems outweigh the benefits significantly.

Because an all digital future a) isn't plausible right now and b) is a bad thing.

A is because even in the US most people have either no internet at all, or piss poor internet service that can't support an all digital future. It wasn't that long ago that the PSPGo flopped flat on its face after all.

B isn't because all digital is actually bad in and of itself, it's bad because corporations are bad and user/consumer rights are treated as absolute garbage most of the time. For example, if Microsoft ends up deciding that they want to shut down the servers for The One and call it good and cut everyone off from all of the games on their consoles, they can get away with it, they have the money, the power, and the influence to get away with it. People may try to fight it, but the people won't win. This leads to a problem both involving consumer rights as well as a problem for people who care about the history of video games. Imagine having a console (not even necessarily The One, but just *a* console *sometime*) that has an entire catalog of games that is completely inaccessible because of an all digital future.

Digital broadcasting isn't the same as all digital games either. Consider that with DVRs and other recording devices not only can we record live television, save it as files on our computers, or burn them onto discs, television shows are also (mostly) put out in disc form for people to be able to buy and collect and watch any time they want to. TV as a medium could completely crash and burn and die in a fire but if you have those discs with t.v. shows on them, you can watch them still so long as you have a television and something to play the disc itself on.

Now, that's not to say that Microsoft will be the one to shiv consumers in a dark alley and run away with their money, but it's also not a scenario that should be complete ignored because "oh it probably won't happen."

On top of all of that, you have to consider that right now we, as consumers, are used to the idea that if I want to buy a game, say, three years after its release, there's relatively few scenarios where I'm paying full price for that good anymore. However, without brick and mortar stores (which is actually something to fall in under category B) who have to lower prices to move stock that's eating up shelf space and thus costing them money, there's considerably less incentive to ever drop the price of a game. Imagine an all digital future where six years after release Titanfall is available for download for 50$! Again, it's not to say that that is going to happen (Steam and GOG help with that to some extent since they do run incredibly good sales due to their natures of 'expose people to the service so they keep coming back for more even after the sales have ended.') but it's entirely possible it could happen. There are still some games on the 360 marketplace after all that I think run 40$ despite being able to buy them new from retailers for a fraction of that price.

Diverging for a moment, you also have the problem of brick and mortar stores. Now if we went to an all digital future for games at the end of this year (say for both PS4 and The One) brick and mortar stores would be fucked and cut completely out of the picture. Not only does that do considerable harm to them as businesses, but it does harm to game sales over all because of the fact that we haven't naturally reached an all digital society. People are still used to going out to stores and buying games there, to being exposed to games no other way than by in a retail store. As people who are fans of gaming and who go out of their way to frequent video game websites, I think it's easy to forget that there are a lot of people out there who don't come to places like this to learn about video games, there are a lot of people who just pick up random crap off of the shelf, think it looks cool, and buy it. Those sales would have to come from people going out of their way to browse the stores within the respective console services (XBMarketplace and PSNStore) which I don't think is as likely to happen because those are services you have to go out of your way to use (as opposed to a retail store where you could browse the games section just because you were in the store already to buy something else.)

Then you get to the problem of trading and sharing video games. I believe somewhere in the all digital future we should reach a point where games are able to be shared and even traded. As it stands now though, those aren't established norms for digital content. But I borrow and share games with my friends all the time, from old games to recently released ones. It lets my friends or I say "hey, this game is pretty cool, you should check it out." and he hands me the disc and I get to play it - no jumping through hoops of having to register as family members or anything, just, I get it and I get to play it. I can't speak to how common of an occurrence that is, but, it's apparently something that a large number of people feel strongly about having the right to be able to do. If digital games aren't willing to understand that and go that extra mile to make it happen (which obviously has problems and concerns all its own that would still have to be addressed so as to help prevent game sales from downright tanking due to people openly sharing games with whoever they want whenever they want as often as they want through online means and all that jazz) then consumers by all means have every right to fight for what it is that they want the freedom and ability to do with the video games that they buy.

No one's arguing that DD future won't happen, the problem is that its clearly not ready yet and its being forced upon the market when it clearly isn't ready yet. And other than convenience and sales, there really is no reason for a dd future yet. Its basically just preferences right now. There are people who prefer a dd system and there are people who prefer physical copies. Right now physical copies on consoles have way more value so there's no reason to go digital yet.

It's interesting that there is an actual discussion happening here instead of people yelling past each other.

My complaint is that most of the people I hear advocating the "all digital future" take it as a foregone conclusion that you will no longer own the license to the media. Yes, that's the way Steam, PSN, and XBLA are structured now. But if we are really heading towards all-digital, we should take the time to consider the issues and do it right.

• If I no longer own the license and cannot trade, sell, smoke, offer as sacrifice, etc. then why am I being asked to pay the same price? The product is less valuable to me.
• Why shouldn't there be a mechanism in place for trading licenses? BECAUSE MONEY is not an answer I will accept. It didn't ruin the game industry when the bits were on disks. It didn't ruin DVD sales, or BluRay. Hell, DRM-free music is a thing and working just fine. If we need a 8hr escrow to slow down digital license transfers we can consider that.
• Copyright law is FUBAR. The current terms of copyright laws are not sane and do not support the original intent of the law. We need to be talking about ~20-25 year durations, no extensions.

The realities of a more closed, locked down system is not more game sales for publishers in the long run. It's unhappy customers. Customers who will turn to piracy or other entertainment if you push them. The gaming industry could wreck itself fairly easily in the next few years. I'd rather not see that happen.

You can have both. Sell discs without forced online and with trade-in possibility and sell digital versions with drm, like on steam. But as on steam make the digital versions 20$ cheaper then the DRM-free discs. That would be a sane model where everybody wins. Give part of the advantage you gain from DRM back to the user in form of cheaper prices and let them decide if they want it.

The main reason I can think of why this isn't happening is, that it would piss off retailers like wal mart and gamestop if digital copies would be cheaper. But thats the way it needs to be in order to work. They don't want that and they still are big enough to influence those decision. E.g. by threatening to not sell the system at all or promoting the competitors box, ...

As someone who plans to buy digital as much as I can going forward, I definitely value used games.

A lot of good points here. Truthfully Microsoft is probably the company I trust less in bringing on the future. While there have been gains from the advancements Microsoft brought to the console market, many have been many losses. DLC, pay for online, timely dlc exclusives, online subscriptions, etc. Also backhand policies, like paying developers for preferencial treatment, and treating costumers like cattle, totally dismissing them.

I have had enough of Microsoft, the severe drought of exclusives - appart from Halo and Gears of War - for Xbox 360 for approximately 4 years, plus the expensive Games On Demand where downloadable game's prices never drop.