No, Heavy Rain Developer Hasn’t ‘Lost’ a Penny to Used Game Sales

Sometimes game developers' feel of entitlement sends clouds of cartoon steam from my ears. Case in point: Quantic Dream's co-founder Guillaume de Fondaumiere, who seems to think his company has "lost" sales of between €5m and €10m ($6.8m and $13.6m) to the secondhand sales commercialize. Guillaume arrived at that range aside comparing the number of players registering trophies along the PlayStation Network to the numerate of actual sales. That's a defensible metric for gauging old sales, but the whimsy that anything was "lost"? Indefensible.

I'm about to put a ill-used car up for sale. Information technology'll be the second time since it rolled off any dealer's whole lot with a handful of miles on the odometer that this car's been sold used (I was the first secondary commercialise emptor). Neither the car's manufacturer nor the original dealer's going to see a penny of any I end up selling it for. That's how the secondhand market works. I probably assume't need to remind anyone the old market for automobiles is massive. And yet you never visualize automobile manufacturers colic about complete the "lost" gross revenue foisted on them by nefarious used car dealers or cliquish owners availing themselves of some section paper's classifieds.

Likewise, just about anything else that's a tactual retail object (unless we're talking something like Monsanto's Roundup Ready and waiting seeds—don't get me started). When I want to offload books, I donate to a surplusage store that'll resell them, or hold a service department sale, or dial up a bulk vendee who'll pass me pennies on the dollar to package them up for recirculation through a service like Amazon.com. The unvaried applies to video tapes, discs, music CDs, honeyed instruments, furniture, clothing, art, desktops, laptops, printers, and [insert anything else here].

What's unique nearly the video games industry? Ohio ethical, nothing. A physical game is a retail object. Since information technology harbors well duplicable digital computer code, at that place's an anti-piracy angle here that is perfectly defensible—no one's entitled to thievery—but reselling physical products is some legal and honourable. It's also none of the publisher's or Jehovah's beeswax.

Sure, a newspaper publisher can sell a product digitally, ala Steam, and curl out the used grocery. Publishers are also entitled to perplex reselling by giving games alone activating codes (think MMORPGs like Earthly concern of Warcraft). If customers get into't like the fact that they prat't resell a digital or code-locked halting, they don't have to pip out. No combined's forcing them to, and nowhere is information technology written that we're entitled to whatsoever someone's selling—that's no Thomas More the event than the belief a reseller has a right to siphon off money from used game sales.

I'm fine with the retail object disappearing. You won't find me griping that I send away't resell a song I bought on iTunes or a movie I watched on Netflix. For the latter, I pay a underlying subscription rate, I vigil some movies every month, and everyone's close to happy. That may be where games are headed: either to subscription-settled online-only access or digital-only artifacts you can't resell (though Steam's member trade-in beta is intriguing). And if developers or publishers manage to eke out some forgiving of net-sharing deal with a mega-retailer like GameStop patc we're still transitioning to an all-digital model, okay, zero trouble.

But this feeling—echoed unthinkingly by about in the media—that used back sales equal money "lost" to a biz's creator, is right a not sequitur. It smacks of entitlement, of "we deserve royalties connected all sales event of anything we bring i," of reconceptualizing a secondhand market that's been around for millenia (and, for good reason, paradigmatically intractable). That's simply delusional thinking.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/482710/no_heavy_rain_developer_hasnt_lost_a_penny_to_used_game_sales.html

Posted by: lottwasso1969.blogspot.com

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