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Man, I miss Phil Hartman.

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Ever.

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Even better. I wonder if people are willing to support a method that cripples the storyline of a game?

Even even better. I wonder how long it will take for hackers/crackers to find a way around this?

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Movies cost millions of dollars as well, and are not prohibitively expensive like games are. A movie that only has a $10 million budget is considered "low" budget. Whereas that's the average games normal budget. The big time releases have only slowly cracked the into the $20 million range, and that's usually attributed to growing marketting costs. Hell, look at one of the lead's at Naughty Dog last year, they admitted that each subsequent game made on their Uncharted engine will cost less than the last.

How many games are built on an already founded engine? Look no further than the armada of Unreal Engine 3 games. These are not ever rising costs. When a movie is made they can't just pack up the special effects for one and toss it into another, as the game's industry can.

Yes, games are expensive to make, but they're also quite expensive to purchase. A new release DVD is usually $20. You can buy 3 for the price of 1 game. And with ever shortening game lengths, it's becoming hard to argue you get more bang for your buck out of the average game (of course there are exceptions). And the key here, those new release prices will always drop. First to $15, then to $10 and even sometimes down to $5. Whereas games seemingly no longer drop in price. Nintendo doesn't even seemingly acknowledge the idea and Sony seems to be following suit (how long did it take for greatest hits titles to hit? And why are they at arbitrary prices. So if a game doesn't sell millions and then have its sales stagnate it'll never drop in price? Seems to be. And Microsoft isn't any better.

So of course people are forced to do what they've done with belongings for ages... You have a cow you're not using? Here's some eggs for it. You got a nice pair of pants there, here's some money. Hey, you got a used game you're done with, here's some trade in credit for something else. Forcing people to buy your complete product in segments is a very callous and naive business move. What next, buy the action figure, then buy the head at a later date?

Considering the industry is booming and now rivaling the other entertainment industries, if not surpassing them, it's borderline hilarious to hear them claim their being hurt by renters and the second hand market. Hell, get some legislation going like the movie industry did so you can a piece of the rental pie. Even more money for your pockets.

It's especially hilarious coming from the head of Epic. Ya know, the people who's engine is used in just about every damn thing anymore, and thus they get licensing fees for everything. Oh yes, they have to be hurting for money.

It's all a matter of the industry exploding in popularity and the heads of these companies are salivating with greed thinking about all that profit than can fish in.

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Maybe my roommate, or my little brother, or my buddy (or all three) played my retail copy with me. Maybe I loaned it out to my friend who would have otherwise never bothered with the game. Is that such a bad thing? Now that he's had a positive experience he went out and pre-ordered Gears 2 as a result, I don't think so.

Is it such a bad idea to allow people to rent videogames so as to broaden their exposure to the medium as a whole?

Summarily, perhaps the reason the rental and used games markets are as large as they are has more to do with videogames being too expense (and becoming more so this gen) to achieve real mass market penetration. I'm no game publisher, but I think I'd rather sell a million $40 game sku's than 200,000 $60 sku's within my launch window... but then, what the hell do I know?

Only that there's a huge difference between the number of games I'd like to play, and the number of games I can actually afford. That's the only reason I use gamefly and trade-in old games towards new purchases at all... even as a hardcore enthusiast, it's just too damn expensive for me to purchase more than a dozen or so games a year; even when I have the time and appetite to play 20-30.

I'd love to monetarily support the every developer whose work I respect. Unfortunately the economics of the hobby make it impossible for me to do so, and I'd wager I spend more money on gaming than the average user ever would.

What does that say about the industry's prospects moving forward?

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My favorite example is the aforementioned Spore. Not only are the people who bought it screwed if they want to play on their laptop and home pc, and with the virus infestation and reformat of both, you're out of spore. Pirate the game? No worries! You not only were able to get it days before it was released, but with none of the hassle of having to install EA's downloader! Down with piracy!

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I understand that second-hand sales and rentals mean less copies sold, but if you want to combat this, you need to give the initial buyers a reason to keep their games around, not gouge extra cash out of everyone else.

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Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of my hard copies and have a pretty big collection. Also, I know this would raise manufacturing costs, but at the same time, the consumer would be paying all of that. Additionally, the developer would be getting all of the money, and a lot more consumers would be willing to pay that much/little for a title. Granted, there would be a trade off in that it would take more people/time in order to get to the profits they want (from initial sales of $60), but at the same time, they could keep their games on their sites for as long as they wanted, without consumers fear of the titles going away, or waiting for the prices to go down. Also, once bought/downloaded, you could download it in the future whenever you want, i.e. if you needed to clear up space on your console for another game but then wanted to re-dl and play X again.

Thoughts?

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