Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgk284 | Hacker News Reader

The original buyer already covered the cost of online services provided. Reselling doesn't cost EA anything (it is no different than if the original buyer had just kept playing the game).

It would be different if suddenly two players could play at the same time, but this is like lending a book to a friend... you both can't be reading it at the exact same moment.

View on HN

The two problems I see with your analogy to books is that books don't have an ongoing cost for infrastructure maintenance which online services do. I wouldn't put it past EA to figure out the cost of services provided with a game diminishes over time with one owner, but if someone new were to pick up the game and start playing then they would be incurring a heavier system load than originally forecast.

Book publishers also generally aren't trying to recoup $50-100,000,000 development budgets.

In that case it would be a simpler mental model for the user to just decouple the usage cost from the game cost aka the World of Warcraft model. Why let the original purchaser play as much as they want, cap their usage too (~40-50 hrs of playtime for free) and charge them for usage beyond that. Also if the cost of running servers is so high and such a big drag,why dont they let third parties run game servers and charge a fee. That way competition among game server hosting companies would bring the price down closer to what it should be in the real world.

That doesn't address my second point of recouping high development costs. Anyways, they would have to coordinate this with the platform providers which tend to keep things bolted down quite tightly when it comes to the provision of online services. Are there even any console games available for the Xbox 360 or PS3 that charge monthly fees?

>The original buyer already covered the cost of online services provided.

No it didn't

People don't constantly play games. They play them for awhile after purchase, and then their playtime peters off. If that disc stayed in the hands of the original player, the cost to EA would be near zero for most people, who might bring the game out every couple weeks when friends are over.

While there certainly are original players who keep playing games, they're dwarfed by those who stop playing, or stop playing and sell the game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com