You guys are all missing the point, the reason we buy games is for an experience, you're not paying for a CD (which is physical.

Must like any other experience,  say a vacation or a season pass to a ski mountain, you shouldn't be able to experience all it has to offer, then give it to someone else to experience the same things. The person who is missing out on money and incurring the fact they're basically giving somebody free access to their property is the owner of the experience, in this case, the software company.

When it comes to intelectual property, there is only one owner, and that is the software company, you guys are paying for a season pass of sorts to experience their product.

While I'm not convinced that I disagree with this, it sounds very weird, like Rekal Corporation from "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" implanting memories of an experience in your brain and claiming ownership of those memories. I understand that you're paying for an experience but I don't think you can rationally equate that to intellectual property; that's like saying that Stardock owns the neural pathways in my brain where I created memories of playing GalCiv2.

Well, technically, in part you are paying for the CD I don't think this argument is entirely accurate, since a game is not a movie in a theater. If you just sat and watched a game play out and paid for that.. maybe. Like warreni, I know what you're trying to say, but I don't think it's a solid basis for this kind of argument. When you buy a DVD movie, you no longer strictly pay for the experience (like you did when you went to a movie theater), you actually pay for the physical disc that allows you to repeat the experience at your convenience, more or less.

Which is why I, for one, never sell games I like (like Gal Civ 2). That doesn't mean I don't like to be able to recover money lost buying a game I didn't like (like, say, Sins). Sins isn't a bad game, but it doesn't fit my tastes and I barely got any play out of it. I'd like to be able to recover that $50 (Collector's Edition, sigh) by passing it along to someone that would actually enjoy and play the game rather than leaving it to collect dust on a shelf. My experience losing that $50 has directly resulted in my exhibiting MUCH greater caution buying Stardock games, due to non-transferrability. I decided against preordering (or ultimately purchasing at all) Political Machine 2008 as a direct result of that, I decided it wasn't worth the risk. Not-MOM and Gal Civ 3, both of which I'd have pre-ordered for the beta, are going to have to wait for extensive positive reviews and a demo release to get my money now.

I may be unusual, I don't claim to know, but in my case a lack of software transferrability costs a publisher money. It's clear enough, however, that publishers have a legal right to make their products non-transferrable, so it's entirely up to them to determine what model best suits their business needs.

This applies to any good.  If I buy a used car, Ford gets no money from me.  See the problem?  The software industry thinks it's special.  Every industry on earth would jump at the chance to stop second hand sales of their goods.  Only the software industry actually has the gall to prevent them.  You can give yourself any excuse you want, but there is no justification that is unique to software.

Before someone starts pissing and moaning about how a used car isn't the same as a new one, if I drive a car for a month and then sell it, the damned thing is just as good as new unless I fucked it up.  Cars last a very long time with proper maintenance.  Your software will be incompatible with modern software and hardware long before the car needs an engine overhaul.  How many fifteen year old programs can you use today without assistance or modification?  Getting fifteen years out of a car is just a matter of changing the oil, replacing brake pads and other parts designed to wear, keeping it clean, and not buying one that's a piece of shit to start with.  This with the understanding that cars have a relatively short lifespan, a good kitchen table will outlive your grandchildren if it's taken care of at all.  Many things are vastly superior in durability and long term use than software.

Annatar, either your reading comprehension sucks, or you like to argue and are ignoring it for that purpose.  Conflicts are a result of insufficient standardization and BUGS, not an unavoidable reality that can't be changed.  Read up on hardware vendors some time.  Even the standards that exist are routinely ignored by many of them.  Individual chipsets are shortchanged by vendors and the substitutions made result in aberant behavior.  Even something as obvious as directx compliance for a video card gets fudged on many of the bargain cards.  There is endless bitching by both hardware and software designers on the idiocy that abounds.  If standards were created and held to by all, there would be no conflicts that weren't a product of a design flaw.  Testing a program on a thousand systems to make sure it works on all of them is only required because they aren't.

When I explicitly state the reason for something, either refute it or agree with it, don't pull a console out of your ass.

That is such an inherently self-contradictory statement, one clearly made by a consumer, not a producer.  Of course, it's about 'how much money the producer of the product can make' but just how does the producer do that without consumers?  That is the essential challenge for any business producing a product for sale - balancing consumer satisfaction against price to arrive at what the market will bear.

Who gives a crap about the company? I'm worried about the rights of consumers. In reference to downloadable games, that is a totally different arguement. In that regard I agree with you, but if I buy a physical copy of a game, then I should be able to do with it like I would a book.

Game = Good. Vacation Pass = Service. Goods and services are two different things and are treated differently under the law. If you are saying every time I play a game I am enjoying a service provided to me by a game developer, then I have just lost a little more faith in humanity.

Software companies write games just like authors write books. They are entitled to all the rights given in copyright law, but they are not entitled to control what I choose to do with my copy of the game after I have purchased it. That is the real issue here: somebody is telling me what I can and cannot do with my property. Suddenly I am "renting" the game, not owning. There is something horribly wrong with that.

Technically, you are licensing the game, not owning it. If this is news to you, that's your problem.

That would be the theory of business taught by morons in universities.  The other theory is that you produce the best possible product at the lowest possible price.

Companies that follow the second tend to take over their markets.  Business is more than a demand curve, Walton and Ford knew business.

Its not news, and its not my problem... Its our problem. It is the consumer's problem.

Let us all look at the root issue here, why is the issue of not refunding a game even present?

I mean, with consol games you're allowed to resell them right?
so maybe the finger shouldn't be pointing at the software companies, but to the consumer who for some reason, everyone thinks is innocent.  The large majority of the gaming public has at least pirated one game n their lives, and there is a large amount of people who do it without a care in the world. Don't blame the developers for this issue, blame pirates for the fact you're not getting what you should.

To be honest, games, they are not expensive. You have people nowdays that'll spend at least 5 dollers a day on a cup of coffee at their local starbucks, or people that'll smoke a pack a day because of an addiction which has no benifit to them. Why is it that people think they are so hard done by if they don't like a video game. It's like saying you want a refund after watching a dissapointing movie. Point is, video games are created not by CEO's, they are created by people just like you and me, people who go home everyday, worried about money, their family and kids. These are some of the people who gets paid when we do the honest thing and pay for things the proper way. If we all just shared and re-sold our games, companies make no money, people lose jobs and lives are destroyed, all because you didn't want to spend a few hours worth of your paycheque to help support a lifestyle and industry all we all enjoy.

Some people may not agree with me here, but in the end, companies have to make money, or else this whole industry will fall...

So the people that did nothing deserve to be punished because some pirates are making slight cuts into corporate profits?

A used game has an opened box, likely in less than perfect condition.  The manual has been thumbed through, the pages are curled.  The person buying the used game is expecting it to work, but they probably don't give a shit about the condition of the packaging.  The person that sells the used game is someone that either didn't like it or doesn't collect, and prefers to recoup part of his costs to purchase other things.  Maybe those recouped funds go straight back into new games.  Maybe, with no resales, he buys less to start with because there is more of a risk with that increased cost.  Perhaps the people buying used copies wont be interested in new copies enough to spend that same amount of money on new copies.  Perhaps they'll pirate instead, a rather impressive number of pirates claim they do so because there isn't any advantage to buying them with so few even bothering with a real manual.  Used game buyers might have more in common with pirates than new game buyers.  Perhaps, by banning resales, the pc game market will shrink, and entertainment will be had elsewhere.  There is a rather wide and substantial variety of things to do.

I collect, I even keep the games I can't stand.  I never sell any used games because I have a mental defect and can't get rid of a boring fuck of a game just because I wont play it even if hell freezes over.  I don't buy used games either, for a more rational reason.  People are fucking retards and can't seem to grasp the concept of not scratching the goddamned cd.  If I did sell them though, I know exactly where that money would be going, back into more entertainment.

If there's a net loss for the industry in that scenario, it's minuscule.

Here is a guy with his head on straight.

Since games are patched and not books, you must concentrate only on the retail version of the game and not on the patched version of the game (after all, your CD contains only the retail version) when using your analogy.

Revisions of books are published too (you may have heard somebody in a movie bragging about owning a first edition). However, book publishers do not offer a pamphlet of revisions to people that own the original because it is not feasible to do so. With software and the internet, it is very much feasible to offer patches as they are highly accessible. The anology is not perfect, but I still do believe it is valid.

And free of charge for books owners?

Of course not, I opted not to go into detail because I assumed the reader could infer the obvious, but I am usually wrong when I assume that. When you download a patch for a piece of software, you don't get a brand new copy of the game but with the changes made, you can a little installer that makes the necessary changes. Obviously this is different, so in that regard the analogy does not match, but none of this has anything to do with copyright law. Copyright law would see each individual item as seperate pieces of work, and protect each separately. For the books, that means each book and each revision are separate pieces of work. For the software, that means the game and the patch files are both separate pieces of work. In all cases everything is protected by copyright. Perhaps the solution for software companies is to support the second-hand sale of physical version of its games but not to support patches and downloads for the second-hand user.

I repeat, the anology is not perfect, but I still do believe it is valid.

EDIT: I should also point out that patches being offered for free is a courtesy of software companies... they don't have to do it. For example, Apple charged users $20 to update iPod Touches to the 2.0 software.