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You're still not getting it.

It's irrelevant that graphics from 10 years ago aren't as good as they are today because that only matters for games where cutting-edge graphics are part of the selling point of the game (i.e., AAA games). There are plenty of games that don't try for cutting edge graphics and so look the same today as they did when first released, like Cave Story, Celeste, Fez, Braid, etc.

The point the parent was making is that a copy of a game is inherently the exact same as any other copy of the game, which is not the case with physical goods. A physical good, however lightly used, still has some wear and tear when resold, so it is not the same as a new good.




So, in this case, suppose I lose my phone, then buy a new one, but before opening the box I find my old phone again.

I have spent money on the phone but there is literally no degradation. Is selling the unnecessary phone hurting the industry? How much money is Samsung losing?

The whole "perfect copy" sounds like an invented reason to stop preventing people from exercising their rights to me. I don't see why the quality of a product needs to be degraded before you're allowed to sell it. The market is as big as the amount of people playing your game at the same time, that's how it's always been up until Steam came along. Games were made before Steam and they will be made when they are sold second hand again.

The only difference between hardware and software in this regard is that software actually can be prevented from being resold. I see no reason why we should.


It's not that they're not getting it, it's that your point is a poor one. A physical copy also came with the costs of storage, storefronts, retail space, manufacture, shipping, etc. None of that is true now. A digital copy costs almost nothing to store and retrieving that copy is again a nearly costless process. The only person who loses by locking up digital goods is the consumer. You're making the same arguments film studios made about VHS, except VHS caused movie studios to make more money than ever because it forced then to make better stories and movies. What do we get now that there's the digital push? Rehashed super hero stories and 90s nostalgia.


> The only person who loses by locking up digital goods is the consumer.

In the short term they my be losing out (kind of. It's like how I lose out when I don't steal at the grocery store.) but in the long term they're gaining because the companies making the goods they're purchasing get to stay in business.

It's a trade-off. Do you want video game consumers to have a short-term boost because everything's free, or do you want them to have a healthy game development ecosystem where talented devs can get loans to make good games because they'll have a predictable revenue stream from sales. You can try to balance the two, but you can't give them both.

Really all of this I want it free, I want it now just leads to free-to-play games where the developer recoups costs through micro-transactions, loot-boxes, pay-to-play items, etc. And in this model you probably never own the game at all. If the user can't be trusted to own the game, then never give them a complete game! Always keep part of it on your own servers. Force them to log in, force them to be connected, force them to have an active credit card number on file.

If we demand to resell/copy/trade the digital goods we purchase without restriction then this is the world we get - we stream movies, we stream music, we connect to game servers, but we never possess any of it. We never listen to a song without Spotify taking notice and putting it in our file. We never watch a movie in privacy without Netflix, "oh, he's watched Fight Club three times this week." We never get to play a game without server-side analytics being run to look at how tweaking the boss difficulty affects sales of the super-sword.

It's not as simple as saying locking up digital goods hurts the consumer.




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