I don't think people really want "buy" either. Not deep down.
For instance, I bought Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. That game is locked in. No fixes, no additions, no nothing. What is on the cart is what you get. Nintendo has no more obligation to me and I have no more obligation to them.
But people expect updates and changes. Let's not talk about "incomplete games being finished through updates", games get updated all the time now. Even for physical copies. Games now often install on the hardware and check for updates on first run.
So if we go to "buy", if you get a broken game, that's on you. Don't buy from them anymore. You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game. You paid for the thing, they gave you the thing. If you want a refund, return the thing.
I think we still haven't quite figured out how to work with ephemeral goods like software. It's kind of like a performance, kind of like a physical item, etc. It requires far more effort to generate than it does to copy. And buyers want to buy on the value of the copying, but sellers want to sell on the value of generation.
> So if we go to "buy", if you get a broken game, that's on you. Don't buy from them anymore. You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game. You paid for the thing, they gave you the thing. If you want a refund, return the thing.
No, it's the developers' responsibility to release a finished product that works properly. The ability to simply do updates later has introduced a cancerous mindset to almost all areas of software development, where it is now suddenly OK to release an unfinished, buggy, or broken product and "fix" it later.
> You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game.
Generally people purchase products with the expectation of them not being defective.
When I buy a single player game I expect to be able to play it in 10 years or even 20. I should get DRM free binaries that run on Windows 11 or what not.
If in 20 years I need to run an air gapped VM to play it, fine.
What's not cool is if a single player game needs to phone home, and when it can't, my purchase is disabled.
But if you go to a shitty concert, you don't get your money back.
If you buy a shitty album, you can't get your money back. And you can't get the band to "make it better" for you.
Is software a thing? A performance? A recording? It has elements of each. And despite people saying "we've solved this issue", we haven't. We keep slapping on different metaphors and complaining when that metaphor inevitably fails.
That and no one really wants to pay the actual price for complete, error-free software. What they want is to get complete, error-free software for the price they've paid. Which is different.
> But if you go to a shitty concert, you don't get your money back. If you buy a shitty album, you can't get your money back. And you can't get the band to "make it better" for you.
The difference is whether "shitty" is subjective or actually defective.
Like, if you don't like the music, that's on you, someone else might like it.
And, I've certainly been to concerts / movies / events where there have been "experience-breaking" technical difficulties and they've (partially or fully) refunded the tickets.
Hi, I'm a people. I want to buy games, deep down. I want to slap a cart into my console, press power and just have the game be ready to play. I don't want internet connectivity. I'll wait a year or two for the sequel if I enjoyed it enough. Maybe I'll trade it or sell it. Hell, if I really enjoyed it, I want to be able to hold onto it and play it like this well past its original production run.
I personally have no interest in “buying” anymore, either.
The games I care about are the ones that I can play with my friends, online. Nearly all of these have transitioned to driving revenue from other means than an upfront purchase.
I’m arguably paying less now, than I did when I was younger. I used to have dozens of games that I played just a few times. $60 to sit on the shelf.
Now, I “subscribe” to one or two flavors of the month. I pay perpetually, but my overall cost is lower since I’m only paying for what I actually use.
I don’t see why you think this can’t work when the current system has only been in place for the last decade. The majority of things pre-2010 were all “fixed”. If anything, quality has only decreased since then, because companies know they can release the absolute bare minimum, and only have to invest as much as it takes to get the majority of buyers to stop having the energy to complain about it. If that were a fixed game instead, putting in that bare minimum would be a one time event, after which no one would buy from them again.
Okay but "buy" back then also implied that a game had to work, or else the reputation of a developer would be destroyed permanently rather than temporarily until fixes came out. And, correspondingly, there was not a culture of selling broken console games like there is today.
This entitled attitude is part of the problem. A game can’t simply be shipped and done anymore. It means the quality can slip, because “we’ll patch it after we ship.” It also means the author has to continue development indefinitely, which means they’re also never done.
Companies in the past making games that you would pay for once were somehow still making lots of money despite providing support for the game for a few years after launch.
The cost of a few years of support is built into the price of the software.
>But people expect updates and changes. Let's not talk about "incomplete games being finished through updates", games get updated all the time now. Even for physical copies. Games now often install on the hardware and check for updates on first run.
How so, I do not expect that a developer will add more content to a finished game for free. And AFAIK in the games I own the content updates are paid DLCs, I can only think at No Man sky as an exception that added more free content, in fact the thrend is to have like 50+ paid DLCs and milk the players for at least a decade.
For instance, I bought Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. That game is locked in. No fixes, no additions, no nothing. What is on the cart is what you get. Nintendo has no more obligation to me and I have no more obligation to them.
But people expect updates and changes. Let's not talk about "incomplete games being finished through updates", games get updated all the time now. Even for physical copies. Games now often install on the hardware and check for updates on first run.
So if we go to "buy", if you get a broken game, that's on you. Don't buy from them anymore. You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game. You paid for the thing, they gave you the thing. If you want a refund, return the thing.
I think we still haven't quite figured out how to work with ephemeral goods like software. It's kind of like a performance, kind of like a physical item, etc. It requires far more effort to generate than it does to copy. And buyers want to buy on the value of the copying, but sellers want to sell on the value of generation.