The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled this week that software companies have the right to prevent their products from being re-sold by consumers. The specific context of the case involved AutoCAD, which is a program often used by engineers for drafting and design purposes. A copy of AutoCAD is not cheap — a new copy can go for upwards of four thousand dollars. AutoCAD’s developer, Autodesk, was being quite reasonable in its pursuit of this lawsuit. It is not an insignificant concern to lose multiple thousands of dollars per copy of a program which is ubiquitous in the engineering trade The gaming media jumped all over this news and immediately began looking for connections to the fate of the used-games market, as the Appeals Court ruling was tied to the End User License Agreement (EULA) signed by each user of the AutoCAD software. EULA agreements are fairly standard compositions, and chances are most of us have agreed to the proposition that the game we are playing has not actually been sold to us, but “licensed” to us. In plain English, that means that we don’t actually own the game, rather the publisher is allowing us to pay them $60 for the privilege of playing it. If I could draw comics, I would have already inked up a few panels depicting Activision sending home-brewed law enforcement commando squads into the home of everyone who owns Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to forcibly remove said software, followed by the publisher shipping a new version of the same game on the market for another $60, seeing as how they have millions of gamers hooked. I clearly don’t take this “threat” to the used games market very seriously, because things used to be simpler before we had a used games market.
When it came time to pick up Halo:Reach, I first took a hard look at my game shelf. I try to keep my collections tidy, and traditionally wind up with 10 titles or less for any game system once it’s past its prime. I had over 20 Xbox 360 game cases on that shelf on September 14. It was time for some judicious pruning. NHL 10 was an obvious choice as I own the more current iteration. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was a much more difficult decision. Battlefield: Vietnam is coming out sometime in the near future, and the Battlefield games are my favorite first person shooter franchise. Vietnam would ostensibly be something I’d indulge in…but between Halo: Reach, Medal of Honor, and Call of Duty: Black Ops, finding full squads for an old game is likely to be extremely challenging. Hence, why not just turn in Bad Company 2 and pay less cash out of pocket for Reach? My logic was “Well, if any of my friends turn out to love Vietnam, I’ll just get Bad Company 2 off GameFly for a month, download the expansion, have my fun, and then send the game back.” On reflection, I’m not sure whether the math works out. I got $15 in GameStop credit for Bad Company 2. A monthly GameFly scrip is $16.95. I’m potentially going to have to spend more money than what I saved on Reach in order to get access to Bad Company 2 again. I likely would have been better off just keeping Bad Company 2 until I decided whether Vietnam was worth my time or not. I remember a time when, if I bought a video game, I didn’t have a script running in the back of my mind which said “If it doesn’t live up to the hype, I can just turn it in quickly for 50% of the value to put towards something else.” When I bought a game it was “until death do us part,” and I never suffered for it. I never had a bad game in my collection, either, and I accomplished this discerning feat with only a fraction of the video game media outlets available to us today, by relying on the tried and true method of “word of mouth.”
A used car salesman might offer us cash that someone else wouldn’t for our trade-in, but how many of the cars on his lot are actually worth the purchase? An imperfect metaphor, but doesn’t it stand to reason that we tend to keep the good games in our collection, hence a majority of the used titles on the shelves of GameStop might be of questionable quality? I also find that store credit feels much less like the real currency it once was, or from a certain point of view actually is, such that it’s easier for a gamer to justify picking up a mediocre title which they normally wouldn’t look twice at as long as they are paying for it with store credit. Or they can bring back said used game within 7 days for a full store credit refund and turn GameStop into a virtual, weekly GameFly subscription. While this does create a solution to my Battlefield: Vietnam dilemma, it also adds to the perception of video games as pure, disposable product, which ultimately retards the maturation of our form and the quality of our titles simultaneously. We don’t know the connection between the used games market and new games sales because we don’t have the data to crunch; but my historical experience suggests anecdotally that if gamers had to consider their purchases with the same sort of finality as back in the day, gamers might buy fewer games, and perhaps developers would have to better justify our spending $60 on them. Therefore, I’ll be watching these legal shenanigans with a bemused but ultimately disinterested eye. Losing the used games market wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, and might actually lend us some concrete benefits.