whatever the reason are the music industry has far less revenues then before.

Digital sales are big but do not generate anywhere near the revenue as CD sales did.

Sure everyone is ITunes!! and such but back in the day a lot of people bought cd's but buying music online ? lol no.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/technology/28scene.html

Used games actually help to support the sale of new games. That's right, the used market actually helps! I know you may not want to believe it, but it is true.

As for piracy, those people were never going to buy the game anyway. All that it has done is make companies come up with increasingly worse DRM that is a pain for the legitimate consumer. So I guess from that stand point, piracy is worse.

Intrestingly, something like 14% of new games bought at gamestop are bought with store credit.

I had one friend who was crazy like that.  He never owned more then one videogame or one console at a time.

Once he wanted a new game he immeditly sold back the old one help to pay for it.

piracy because the developer never got a sale from the product in the first place.
but with used games , they already got the sale. from the original owner.


plus with the new online passes , definatly makes piracy hurt more!


if you think about it when you pirate your not giving any one money. as u would with new or second handused ,

at least when you buy used your money goes to the retailer who sells the games , and as a result your feeding the economy each time

but with piracy your just a common theif ,. in a different way , and that does not help the economy that only hurts it more

Anyone that buys a used game at gamestop would probably buy a new game if the used wasn't availebale beings it's generally at most like a $5 difference.

Piracy is one thing... and used game sales may 'hurt' the developers, but so freekin what?

Having to keep a game you have finished and will never play again hurts your bottom line. And last time I checked games are still classified as goods, and goods are allowed to be re-sold.

So I think the industry is full of shit when they start blaming used games for all of their problems. Ford doesn't bitch about how used car sales ruin their new car sales and they are not disabling the engine for a fee if a car is resold.

If these game publishers had any business sense they would have controlled the whole used game sales situation by allowing trade ins for new game credit themselves. Video games are already one of the most over valued and quickest to depricite goods in existence and they want the users to take a financial hit on top by not re-selling their games at all.

Not piracy, not used games in general, but the GameStop system to sell used games, because it affects games sales to honest, paying users particularly during the launch period, when many games earn the most of their lifetime revenue. Direct consumer-to-consumer used games sales, but also consumer-to-store and store-to-consumer ones, if they don't follow the GameStop model, are actually beneficial, they allow many hardcore gamers to buy more games without the GameStop system drawback.

Yeah like 5 copies, which millions then proceed to leech. Really high contrast when the used games are only the ones that have been sold on after purchase.

So much for the record industry’s insistence to the contrary.

Once again we have a study by flesh and bone researchers who have discovered that music piracy actually increases music consumption.

“Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis” was conductEd by the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway and the second largest in all of Europe. The study looked at almost 2,000 online music users over the age of 15, and asked file-sharers to prove their legal music purchases rather then simply rely on their honesty.

It concludes that those who download music illegally also purchase the most number of legal digital downloads. In fact, the study reports that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.

“The most surprising thing is that the proportion of paid downloads is so high,” said BI researcherAudun Molde. “The results suggest that they are buying twice as much music as they get for free, and also those who state that they download for free actually are the greatest consumers of paid music online.”

As usual, record labels say the results are bogus. After all, one illegal download equals one last sale right? That’s what they teach in music industry school.

“There is one thing you cant explain, and it is that the consumption of music increases, while revenue declines,” says EMI record label rep Bjørn Rogstad. “It can not be explained in any way other than that the illegal downloading is over the legal sale of music. “Based on the results from the survey you might think that the free download stimulates a paid download, but here it’s tough keep the tongue straight in your mouth. Whether those who download music for free would buy the same music, it is, and is a purely hypothetical question.”

He may have trouble believing it, but I don’t. Why? Think about it. The record industry has been hammered by a number of factors, but perhaps by none more so that the bane of all decent, hard working musicians – the digital single.

A $20, grossly overpriced, physical album used to be what everyone bought and then came the digital music revolution. To make matters worse, people no longer wanted 2 good tracks and 15 of fluff. They wanted a single song, which they could suddenly get for 99 cents, less than a single dollar.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where your profit margins headed with this new paradigm shift.

Molde also takes the music industry to task for not focusing all of its efforts on creating music delivery platforms consumers actually want.

“There should be no record industry task to prosecute those who download illegally,” he added. “They must work aggressively to create good music and make it available in legal forms. It is the legislators job to enforce copyright law.”

Without skipping a beat, Rogstad counters that the music industry isn’t wasting too much time suing file-sharers, and insists that they are working overtime to create music services people want.

“No, we are using much, much more time to develop good services, he says. “In my opinion, is not the key to fight file-sharers whatsoever, it lies with providers, the so-called ISPs.”

Moreover, the study echoes the previous conclusions of none other than the Canadian govt, which found that “P2P file-sharing tends to increase rather than decrease music purchasing.”

That report, The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada, was commissioned by Industry Canada, a ministry of the Canadian federal government, and includes extensive surveying on the music purchasing habits of the Canadian population.

“Our review of existing econometric studies suggests that P2P file-sharing tends to decrease music purchasing,” says the study. “However, we find the opposite, namely that P2P file-sharing tends to increase rather than decrease music purchasing.

The record industry claims to use facts and figures to support its conclusion that file-sharing is to blame for decreasing profits, but once again we see that the people it’s blaming for its woes are actually among its best customers.

If file-sharers buy 10 times as much music as their law abiding counterparts, then couldn’t you argue that suing them is actually accelerating the record industry’s decline?

Oh the irony.

However, and its something I just now considered, it’s that though the researchers ask for proof of music purchased, i.e legal music consumption, they have no way to verify illegal music consumption. A guy can say he only downloaded two songs illegally in the past month and then bought twenty, with receipts to prove it, but how do the researchers know for sure he only illegally downloaded 2 songs? P2P doesn’t provide receipts. To use an unsubstantiated claim on the one hand, and written proof on the other certainly allows one to question the study’s conclusions. As much as I like what it has to say, I’m sure we wouldn’t give the RIAA any slack if it had a study with findings.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86009/study-pirates-buy-10-times-more-music-than-they-steal/

I have to say piracy. Used games do a lot of damage but to sell a used game a customer has to buy it new first. A used game switches hands up to what three times. That is a loss of two sales. But a pirated copy can be distributed to millions which is a far greater loss. Not to mention pirated copies are huge in poorer countries but piracy in poorer countries drives retail prices higher. The fewer copies that you can sell the more you need to ask.
Piracy needs to be stopped used games are not good for publishers and developers but pirated games are simply a no no.