PUBLIC OPINION > Keep Gaming Consoles on the Ground

The game companies are seriously considering this kind of step. They want to make it so people can never buy a "used game" because it will all be digital downloads. How does it hurt a game company's business for a single game disc to be sold twice? They make more money off of a single copy that way. Not to mention that if a game sucks, or you don't really care for it, it would be too bad, because you paid $60 non-refundable dollars for it, instead of even having an opportunity to buy it used to try it out and being able to recoup even a small amount of that if you don't like it.

You could never let your friends borrow your game if digital format took over. Unless you let them borrow your console, that is. Neither could you bring your game to someone else's house to play without, again, bringing your console. That is ridiculous.

I also wonder how (in the event of switching to a purely digital format) they will up the memory so that it could include all the games that would be in a gamer's library, if they even try. Would they expect gamers to buy more hard drives for their console in order to house all of their games? How is that practical? How will you remember which 50 games are on which hard drive? (That's just an example number)

Aside from all that, there is nothing like the satisfaction of standing in my living room, looking at the bookcases bought from Borders closing, and seeing them lined with physical books, movies, music, and games. I'd much rather have the real thing on my bookshelves than hard drives or consoles with digital versions of those things, no matter how space saving or innovative they are.

Cloud gaming and paying for the rights to play a game without physical ownership of anything tangible is the future. I have fought it, my fellow players have fought it. From 7 or 8 year long active threads in Amazon's forums to tiffs in other forums, so many active posters in these battles are participants in the video game industry. They range from development, marketing to peripheral jobs dependant to video game revenue and they are bitterly vocal on no consumer ever actually owning anything except the right to play the games. With a strong argument backed with incredible stats of piracy of PC games. They are avid and very loud in these arguments. Personally, I think the piracy stats are skewed and inaccurate.
Most players in my opinion are on board for whatever they must do to play the games. Not many gamers actually game for more than 5 to 7 years before they move to other things like adulthood, relationships families etc. Many still game but their interest is much lower. So I think of it as new players washing in like waves on the video game market. With each wave, the justification for cloud gaming becomes easier to sell.
My recent personal experience set in stone for me what cloud gaming is really going to be like. EA Games has published many of the titles I own. I bought a few over Christmas on Origin, their Steam Store knock-off. BF3 was one of the games and some Sims stuff etc. I also play their Free to Play game Need for Speed World which like most free online games, sells items in-game with a payment scheme where you buy “Speed Boost” in block increments of $20, $25, $50 and $110. With that cash, you can in turn buy specific cars, upgrades, power-ups and the like...pretty fun… kind of expensive if you aren’t careful. Anyway, I bought a car and it was bugged and came significantly less than was promised. I went to the game’s support forum and complained with like 30 others and after about 3 weeks of being ignored, I filed a support ticket with EA support. This went on and on. I had two different support reps based in India giving me form responses that did not fit the problem. I was getting one response per day that did nothing except please provide the information for your problem. I filed a dispute with PayPal because I had used PayPal to pay for the purchase. OK…now this is where it get’s relevant to cloud gaming and possible problems. They locked my accounts. ALL OF THEM. Anything that required log-on through EA. BF-3, Crysis 2… all that required EA log-in to play. Well needless to say I was angry. I steamed about it all day. In the evening, I found a phone number on the web for others with a similar problem and I called. A really polite rep looked at my problem and said he didn’t get it. That nobody in EA should be able to do what was done to me. He said my account (Accounts really because I have over 20 games registered with EA) were all logged as fraudulent. No description of what fraud in particular of course. He fixed the problem yay! But what if he hadn’t? What if he had just went with it and said, you are a criminal and may not use our games anymore?
Do we read EULAs? Really read them? No. If we did most of us wouldn’t agree. I think the cloud strategy is going at the piracy problem from the wrong end. Enforcement is the way to go. Bust pirates, break torrent sites, stop torrent services. Punish the guilty and you will have less guilty. Stop punishing the paying customer. It’s obviously not working and never will.