Piracy Vs Buying Second-Hand Games

Huh? How is that pirated?

 

well its not the original evo 3 from mitsubishi...

 

And all the boy racers here don't drive GTi's but all their cars are done up like them.

 

haha. This isn't pirating

 

including bearing the brand name?

well maybe imposer would be a more fiting term but still i count them as pirating as much as pirating branded purse....

 

How about person X who buys the game, rips it and lets everyone online pirate it, and then proceed to sell it to Gameshop Q. And then Person L goes to buy that copy. That's probably even worse.

Anyways, I wouldn't worry about Piracy as much as the measures taken to prevent piracy, like DRM for instance. I can't give my opinion on buying second-hand games because I've never ever done so.

 

How about person X who buys the game, rips it and lets everyone online pirate it, then proceeds to smash it into shards and then goes and murders kittens with the broken pieces. And then Person L watches the clips online. That's probably even worse.

 

I buy second hand games because I am a gameboy games collector and as collector I like to have the box and cartrigde... but piracy is free so

 

It's actually just as calvin said, the only reason you're allowed to buy second hand games is because international copyright law specifically mentions that the owner of a physical copy is within his full right to pass it on to someone else.
Game companies doesn't like it at all, and EA and some others have started to put stuff in the boxes that only can be used once to make you buy new copies instead of second hand. Only reason they don't lock you out completely from the game after using it on one console is that games stores like gamestop make most of their profit from traded games, buying a game from someone coming into the store and selling his game for $5 and then reselling it for $29 is more profitable than buying it new from some wholesale company that takes most of the profit.
And if those stores were to close down they would lose their biggest window to the market and that would be even worse. And since you nowadays can buy the content you got for free in a new copy for a little money they sometimes make more money on second hand games than new ones.
This also applies to pirated games, atleast for x360 where they still can be used to go online and download dlc and such, in those cases the gaming stores loses out on money and sales so they won't take in big quantities of a game that's pirated alot, and that indirectly hurts the game companies by not exposing their games on their shelves.

In conclusion, second hand copies of games help the game stores keep their profit margins up, indirectly helping the developers to expose their games to the public. While dlc makes money for the developers.
Pirated games still can be profitable for the developer via dlc, but gamestores won't be able to make money and that indirectly hurts the industry as a whole since they won't get as much exposure.

 

EB games used to reimburse the company for any used or pre-owned title sold. It depends on if a contract for such a things exists. And quite frankly it does. Second hand tends to be a shade of grey area, whereas piracy is outright illegal and often carries mandatory jail time and a fine can be imposed for each act of piracy they can nail you for. In other words, money that no normal person can pay. Of course second hand would be made illegal, as loony said, if the companies weren't getting some kind of kickback, or making the profits up in other areas.

 

we should be allowed to try before buy though. companies shove shit down our throats for high prices all the time. we should be allowed to play if for free and then buy it if we think they deserve to get paid for it. thats what i do anyway.

 

The stink about used games is about publishers who have seen these two conditions:
1) diminishing returns on their investment in game development
and 2) skyrocketing profits for Gamestop's used game program.

Unwilling to accept that this is a result of the market being unable to sustain their current pricing model, publishers began to blame used games and attempt to redefine game ownership as a sort of "lease" or "license" of a game and it's content/media.

This is both self-defeating and immoral. When a person buys a product, they are buying complete, unrestricted ownership of the product. This is both from a legal and moral standpoint. The entirety of capitalism is founded on this concept of ownership. When a person buys wheat from a farmer, the farmer no longer has any input on how that wheat is used. The same holds true for any property. This is the core expectation. When a consumer is denied that basic privilege, the results generally fall into one of three categories:
1) Consumers refuse to pay for the product and no longer respect the seller's ownership. This is demonstrated in squatting. When land owners during the U.S Civil War restoration South began tearing land ownership and homes out from under citizens, the citizens simply used the land and refused to pay anything. In gaming this takes the form of piracy.

2) Consumers turn to producers who do not deprive them of these rights. This should be pretty obvious, but it is also the rarest of the possible outcomes. I cannot think of this being done in gaming off the top of my head

3) Consumers abandon the market. This is what happened to our good friend the Atari 2600.

Personally, I see either 1 or 2 resulting should publishers restrict or remove the ability to resell games. Chances are, fickle as gamers are as a whole, this would be done to the point of complete market collapse. Then the Crash of 1985 would not be alone in gaming history.

As for the moral end, studios and publishers should not be seeing reimbursement multiple times for the same copy of a game anyways. Once a game is sold, it is no longer the property of either the studio or the publisher in any other fashion than copyright. Once purchased, ownership is transferred completely. The company has already been payed. Paying them again for the transfer of a copy that is no longer theirs is simply giving the companies permission to steal from the current owners. Would you like it if I sold you a trading card, and then when you sold what was now YOUR trading card I demanded that you pay me 10% of whatever price you were selling it at? I would assume not.