I’m a little older than some gamers (i.e. I was around when the only way to have fun with electricity was to dare my buddy, gug  [capitalization hadn’t been invented yet] to run across a hill with a bronze pole during a lightning storm).  So I think about a few things that many gamers don’t.  One of the ones that crosses my mind periodically is how I don’t now, and never will, really own my house.  Sure, I’m paying the mortgage and eventually (sometime after the moorlocks are serving eloi bisque) I will no longer owe the bank any more money for it; but it will still not belong to me.  I will still have to pay property taxes for the privilege of living in the house that I will have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars “buying”.  So, in essence, I will still be renting from the government.  They will still be the actual owners.  The other day, it occurred to me that this is kind of like the video gaming industry.

For years people have tried to sell me their used PC games at the various video game stores that I have worked at, and I have always had to politely decline and then explain to them that this is illegal.  Despite the fact that they have paid mucho dinero to purchase said games.  They don’t actually own them.  There is that little thing called the end user license  agreement, that you have to click “yes” to before it will download to your PC.  It states, briefly, that they have purchased the right to play the game but that the disc and its contents are still the property of the manufacturer.  Now, I can understand this to a point.  With the proliferation of cd copying technology this is one of the few means that the game makers have to protect their intellectual property.  All fair and good.  If they can’t do that, then they don’t make a profit, and they stop making video games, and nobody except several religious groups, most parents, school teachers, time budgeters, sports equipment manufacturers, communists and half of the known world really want that.  Console games, though, have been free of this kind of regulation and restriction … until recently.

No, the Feds have not gone even further into neo-fascio-commu-draconian-joy-killing.  The culprits here are the ones that we have been supporting for years with our hard-earned easily spent video gaming dollars … the game manufacturers themselves.  Some of the leading game producers, and I don’t want to mention names, “cough, cough, Sony, cough, choke, cough, EA, cough” have decided that you should never really own the game that you have ponied up $60+ for.  Why, because they feel that they are entitled to more of your money.  How this all works out, I’ll have to delve into next time.

Tags: EA, editorials, sony, Used Games