Pay wall for pre-owned games, good or bad?

So, one of the biggest problems that people seem to be focusing on with the new XBox is that pre-owned games are going to require you to pay a fee to play them. Personally i don’t have a problem with this, and frankly think the rest of the stuff announced is more of an issue than this.

However the interwebs have been totally swamped with this one aspect, so i figured I’d chime in with my views on it.

Personally I’m a PC gamer. the last console i bought (excluding my recent Vita) was a PS2 Slim. Consoles were never a big thing for me since most of the games I’ve loved over the years are available on PC as well, with a few exceptions.

Pre-owned games for PC disappeared many years ago, in fact the only way you’ll get them now is on sites such as EBay. Publishers and stores will give you lots of reasons, ranging from piracy, to viruses, to DRM issues. While all of these definetley played a part in the death of pre-owned games on the PC, the real culprit was the popularity of consoles.

With the rise of the PS2 and original XBox PC gaming started to decline. Major stores noticed this early on and started to move out of PC games and focus on consoles. It got so bad that up until the past few years you were lucky if a store carried more than a stand with the latest PC game releases. Even today the selection of PC games is limited and pre-owned are non-existent.

Console games however are a pre-owned gold mine, and what’s more is that it’s money neither the publishers or dev.s see.

Pre-owned games have their place, they always have. However the way the market handles them is ridicules. I read somewhere (wish i could find it now) that a AAA pre-owned game will go through, on average, 5 users; generating some £200 in pure profit for the store selling them. The dev.s and publishers get their cut from initial game being bought as new, but nothing else.

Game stores deliberately push pre-owned copies of games over new, despite the fact the savings of buying a pre-owned new AAA release is usually only around £5. However they can put the game out for say £35 and when it’s sold that’s pure profit for them.

For a long time publishers have tried to get in on this profit, which frankly i think they deserve a share of. The answer they came up with was two fold, either block pre-owned games altogether or block multiplayer or certain aspects of the game and only allow access if the user bought a ‘network pass’. IMO the network pass was the lesser of the 2 evils, you can still buy your game pre-owned, but to get the full experience you’re going to have to pay the publishers £5-10 for pass to unlock the game.

This was a good option i feel, but console gamers revolted and let their greed and self entitlement drive publishers away from the network pass solution.

The problem here is that gamers need to realise that if publishers don’t get a cut of the pre-owned market it is going to impact games releases. How can they release high quality games when they’re not making the money they should be off of game sales due to pre-owned sales not giving them any profit.

Microsoft seems to have gone fully into the network card element. When you play a game for the first time it becomes bound to your account. To use use it on another account (as in a pre-owned game) you have to pay a fee.

This blanket system is wrong, since it means you can’t loan your friend a game, or even your bro or sis who live in the same house just use a different account than you. However, it’s easy to see why this system came about, because console gamers let their greed and self entitlement run rampant publishers responded with this pay wall.

Of all the issues with the XBox1 this is by far the least of my concerns. The pay wall is already in place in certain PS games, and i can see it becoming more common as publishers seek to claw back money from the pre-owned market.

The best solution all round is for stores like Game Stop in the US and Game in the UK to work with publishers and pay them a fair percentage of the sale of pre-owned games. Though that’s unlikely to happen since greedy corps like those don’t like to let go of any profit.

The other concern of this development of course comes from game rental sites, such as Netflix in the US and LoveFilm in the UK. Will they have to increase their prices to cover the constant network passes?

How will it work, since the way it was explained was that the game installs to the hard drive, you pay the fee and then you own the game and you never need the disk again. This is so open to exploitation it’s silly. What this means for the future of game rentals in general is going to prove interesting. Are we going to see companies move away from XBox and become Sony exclusives?