Comments on: Coffee Talk: You Don’t Own Your Games

By: Coffee Talk: Digital Distrbution, The Way of the Future? « Joe Osborne: Freelance Gaming and Music Culture Journalist

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:50:27 +0000

[...] week, Dan discussed digital distribution and its potential effects on the games industry. This week, we get a chance to see its realities as [...]

By: Coffee Talk: Digital Distrbution, The Way of the Future? « Geekadelphia

Coffee Talk: Digital Distrbution, The Way of the Future? « Geekadelphia — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:02:07 +0000

[...] week, Dan discussed digital distribution and its potential effects on the games industry. This week, we get a chance to see its realities as [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:01:08 +0000

To be fair mike – the ability to download demos is HUGE.

By: mike heller

mike heller — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:22:52 +0000

See Joe, this is what I’ve been saying for a year now. I think it is crazy that you are stuck with a virtual ball and chain of you purchase a dud of a downloaded game. I think that you should have a time frame to test the game and if you don’t like it credit should be restored to your account. I have fell victim to this several times and I was upset!

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:08:31 +0000

I happen to agree that Game$top is not the most fair or gracious of retailers, but its all about being able to do what you want with the media you purchase. You have to realize once upon a time once you purchased something you were free to do whatever you wanted with it and slowly our rights are being changed to technically even though we purchase something, we don’t own it anymore and I wanted to bring some much needed attention to this.

By: Gavin B

Gavin B — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:40:14 +0000

If you were one of the thousands of people who got banned from Xbox Live recently, you lost all access to any legally purchased XBL downloaded game or downloaded content to any game you owned.

Although, honestly, I have no problem with the used market getting eliminated. If only because GameStop is a horrible video game store, they push used copies on you for almost no savings whatsoever compared to the new company, and the developers don’t see a dime of that used money and actually lose money when they convince you to buy a used copy for five dollars cheaper (which they bought for 30 dollars less) than the retail new copy. You may as well just pirate it at that point.

I also think DLC is the worst thing that could have happened to video games, so maybe I’m biased. It has already begun where companies have DLC magically ready the day games come out, which is absolutely heinous. The original defense of DLC was that it gave longer shelf life and more value to titles, but now that companies release incomplete games in order to sell the other pieces as DLC, that argument is invalidated. Not to mention how much certain evil companies love microtransactionining people to death for the littlest stupid things.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:38:09 +0000

“Amazon actually deleted someone’s copy of George Orwell’s 1984 from their Kindle”

irony x2

By: Larry W

Larry W — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:25:36 +0000

I’ve been worried about this for a while, and even posted about it myself back in May on my own blog.

Considering that Amazon actually deleted someone’s copy of George Orwell’s 1984 from their Kindle, I don’t like the fact that you don’t “OWN” anything when it comes to these downloads. Scary stuff to me. That’s why I always buy physical copies of everything.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:56:42 +0000

Interesting post. Now that we’re at a point that hardware is capable of supporting downloadable content (movies, games, music, etc.) I think we are going to see more and more game developers move towards that for exactly the reasons you stated. I can’t really say I blame them because they lose tons of money on the used game market. I’m not a fan of the way gamestop operates so I won’t give them any business but from what I’ve read, sites like Goozex definitely give the gamer the opportunity to stretch their dollar which cuts directly into the game developers profits.

The positive of DLC is that I think it gives independent or smaller development shops the opportunity to get their product out to a wide audience when previously that wasn’t possible. More selection and more choice is always a good thing.

I just finished shadow complex last week – and while it was a great game with a lot of replay value – the fact is I can’t really see myself playing it anymore. It will sit there and do nothing because I can’t give it to anybody else or sell it. Did I get 15 bucks of enjoyment out of it? Sure. But I like the fact that I can recoup some of my cost when I’m done with a game. Gaming can be a very expensive hobby.

While I do agree that we will see more and more DLC coming out in the next few years and see it be successful – I think it will be a very long time before the consumer wraps their head around not being able to buy a video game in a store – I don’t think thats ever going to happen actually. It will always be there in one form or another.