Yes. There's no benefit to buying second hand over pirating a game (apart from owning the physical packaging/manual - however that is down to personal preference), the developer and publishers don't see a penny either way.
Nonsense - that's because of the licencing model.
The media & packaging is manufactured once. The licence is bought once and the model of second hand usage means just a transfer of that licence (right to use - assuming the licence is transferable).
The software was developed with a business case that basically will work out how many copies they will sell. Does second hand usage remove additional sales - yes. However there's still one licence in use..
Does this affect the business case - yes. Just in the way that piracy would if it wasn't factored in either.
If there's a non-transfer clause in the licence agreement then those participating in the secondhand sales and purchasing are breaking the contract. It is up to the company to expend effort to recover it's missing revenues.
The companies then have to decide if it's viable to recover revenue - if the cost of recovery for the 10000s of instances verses factoring in a higher piracy/secondhand loss cost in to the business case next time.
Then they have to see if the business case is viable next time with those levels.. if not then no game and most likely no company shortly after.
Online games such as client/server games with a monthly prepaid subscription have a way of reclaiming licence in the event that the account is passed second hand or the client software is pirated.
I would expect many games (even single player) in future to move to that model.
In the long term, there's always someone that will attempt to rebalance and find a way of creating a non-official server (see WoW for example). The requirements to run a server of this type (with more than 30 people) often mean that it's outside of the average playerbase's ability to provide. Thus the number of servers reduces to a a number where it's viable for the companies to go after the individuals running them to reclaim revenue.
My point is that they can see ways of ensuring they get their money - it's normally the legal player base that rejects the idea of monthly payments in favour of a single £40 cost and free play after.
Games companies have already tried to lock the games to require online resources (any successful MMORPG for example). This requires complexity in the games architecture and the capital cost of the servers (which must pay for themselves in 3 years). All this adds additional costs.
So- what if the games companies charged you 6.67 a month on top of the cost of the servers etc for first 6 months of play to cover the development costs? Then a costs to cover you over for the servers etc after?
Games like BF do this by an upfront cost that pays for a certain time period for the service to allow play.. sooner or later once the Booster packs run out then the cost of running the service will nolonger be viable and the servers will be shutdown thus ending the ability of play. You have paid £40 for say 3 years of play - with the additional cost of booster packs..
This think of a booster pack as a payment for the service with the additional content being a reason to get you buy it..
As you can see.. the costs and the risks within the business case for reclaiming those costs are very high as they have a service to setup and run for a specific period in addition to the development costs.
There's many models to recover costs yet the legal player base will moan at the cost of a BF booster pack.. the fact that it's not free.. and that 's the reason why they sympathise, see the big profits being declared because the business model works and go down the route of Piracy..
The games companies can't win - damned if they fail, damned if they're too successful.
, are you saying that morally speaking pirating a game is just as bad as buying a game secondhand ?, I can understand you saying that it has the same effect in-regards to the developers not gaining any revenue from the secondhand games market but does that make buying games secondhand morally wrong, or as wrong as pirating a game, what do you think ?
