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Physical media is much higher friction to transfer since you have to shift a physical box around which is slow , expensive and time consuming. I have a ton of o

by jiggy2011 13y ago

Physical media is much higher friction to transfer since you have to shift a physical box around which is slow , expensive and time consuming. I have a ton of original xbox games I could have traded in but never bothered because I was too lazy to put them on ebay or take them into the shop. There is also the risk that the disk is scratched which puts people off buying used. OTOH a digital license can be transferred across the globe in a matter of seconds and the product does not degrade with use or get damaged in transit. This means that there is no point buying a new game, just buy the game when you want to play it and sell it when you don't. The total number of new licenses bought only has to support the number of people who want to play it concurrently, not the total number of people who want to play at all. The only way around this would be to impose artificial restrictions on used game sales. For example, you can only sell to people in your own country, a license can only be transferred a fixed number of times etc.

rainforest 13y ago
Isn't the issue of being able to transfer licenses more of a problem with the First Sale Doctrine? To that end, do you think consumers would have the right to transfer books, CDs, DVDs etc. if they were indestructible? Perhaps we disagree, but I think this should be seen as an encouragement to change approaches rather than an opportunity to change a market because it doesn't suit the producer.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  If physical disks/books were as easy to transfer as digital licenses we'd have seen efforts to kill the used market long before now. I'd be amazed if Microsoft would happily let used sales kill their highly profitable market in such a way. In the case of Sony they seem to be using the physical disks themselves as the license, actually storing the data on the disk is simply a convenience. In theory the disk could only contain ~1mb of metadata that triggers a digital download. Will be interesting to see if they keep with that model, I can see having to go out and buy a physical disk or waiting for it to arrive in the mail seeming very antiquated in 5 years.

rainforest 13y ago

Isn't the issue of being able to transfer licenses more of a problem with the First Sale Doctrine? To that end, do you think consumers would have the right to transfer books, CDs, DVDs etc. if they were indestructible? Perhaps we disagree, but I think this should be seen as an encouragement to change approaches rather than an opportunity to change a market because it doesn't suit the producer.

jiggy2011 13y ago
If physical disks/books were as easy to transfer as digital licenses we'd have seen efforts to kill the used market long before now. I'd be amazed if Microsoft would happily let used sales kill their highly profitable market in such a way. In the case of Sony they seem to be using the physical disks themselves as the license, actually storing the data on the disk is simply a convenience. In theory the disk could only contain ~1mb of metadata that triggers a digital download. Will be interesting to see if they keep with that model, I can see having to go out and buy a physical disk or waiting for it to arrive in the mail seeming very antiquated in 5 years.