| I could be wrong, but with easy digital resales allowed it seems like the price would either have to: - Remain stable, so that someone can buy the game for $40, play it for 30 hours of entertainment and finish the game, then resell it for $40, earning the game developer no money. - Continuously decline. Of course this means the price rapidly reaches 0, at which point the game developer can't make any money. These problems would be the same regardless of if the game costs $10 or $60 initially. I think under either of these scenarios most indie and AAA developers would have to switch away from single player pay-once games, since they wouldn't be able to make nearly enough money to pay back the development costs, forget about profits. So if it pans out that way I don't think that is helping consumers. It would take a product that consumers want to buy and developers want to make (single player pay-once games), make it impractical to produce, and shift the market to products that those consumers like less. I'm not a libertarian but that sort of regulatory outcome seems bad, since as far as I can tell it just hurts developers and consumers while earning the government no money. I think instead, if we are worried about game companies making too much profits, we should raise the tax on corporate profits for game companies (although this might lead to less investment, since there will be less return). Or if we are worried the companies having too much revenue, regardless of profits, we should have a special sales tax on video games (like on cigarettes), although that will hurt even unprofitable games. Unlike the mandatory resale plan, these sort of taxes can be adjusted to focus more on big companies instead of small ones that are barely surviving, apply equally to all types of games, and even make the government money. So it's win-lose instead of lose-lose. I don't think mandatory resales would be such a big problem for other types of software like office software that need to be continuously used (although that's moving to subscriptions anyway). The main problem is a lot of video games people just play for 30 hours or so and finish. So if you can buy and sell for the same price people can just do that and pay nothing. I think it's less of a problem in the physical game era since used games aren't identical to new ones (people won't pay as much since the disk could be scratched etc) and it's more trouble to buy and sell them since you have to mail it, pay for postage, wait for it to come in etc. |