It looks like Nintendo has no intention of shutting out the used games market after all. Although the Wii Speak peripheral will come with the previously reported activation code, evidently you can get a replacement by contacting consumer service.
This news comes on the heels of impassioned rhetoric from both sides of the used games debate. Developers have contended that used games sales hurt developers by locking them out of the purchasing process, while retailers point out that consumers expect their games to have residual value and store credit can be turned toward new games.
So where do you fall? Is the $5 you save at Gamestop worth cutting out the people who made it in the first place, or does the $60 price tag make you less sympathetic for the developers’ plight?
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Tags: 1up · Gamasutra · gamesindustry.biz · GameStop · used games2 Comments
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The publishers and developers are whining. Movies, CDs, books, and cars all manage to survive having a vibrant used market. Trying to stop used sales will only reduce the demand as people who buy games expecting to sell them will wait for the prices for new copies to drop. Add in the added bonus that this will destroy our video game culture. Do you want to show a fellow game designer or critic an game that is critical to the development of the medium? Whoops, it’s been a decade and you’ve replaced the original Xbox you had, so either the game doesn’t work, or it’s crippled. Goodbye cultural history.
Capps deserves special ridicule for the non-sequitor, “He went on to cite evidence from Crytek that the ratio for pirated to non-pirated versions of Crysis was 20:1 – precisely the reason why Epic has no plans to release Gears of War 2 on the PC.” PC games have a much, much weaker resale market; the fraudulent scam that is EULAs seem to forbid it, so major chains won’t touch them. And what’s with the piracy comparison? That 95% of his users are using infringing copies has exactly what to do with resale? Did it occur to Capps that if you kill resale, a big chunk of people who would have bought legal, used copies will flee to illegal copies?
That is the weird thing about the anti-piracy and anti-secondary market position. It assumes that you’ll convert all the people who aren’t paying you right now into paying customers when there’s very little evidence that will actually happen.