What our good friends at Ubi$oft are doing...

[klem]

Originally Posted by Seeker

Not so sure I agree, Klem.

In both company cars and enterprise hardware, resell value is an important factor in making the purchasing decision.

No fleet manager will buy Italian, regardless of how much the sales reps fancy an Alfa, as the fleet manager knows that he'll get nothing in three years time when the warranty runs out, while if he specifies German he'll get back a significant proportion.

The same with hardware. We're changing from P5 AIX machines to virtual Linux on x86 precisely because we'll be able to sell the x86 blades when they're written off as assets in three years, while the Power architecture second hand market has tanked (and a new machine is 15 mil D. Kroner).

So it's a marketing issue.

Can you imagine buying a car with non transferable ownership?

I obviously didn't explain myself very well. I entirely agree with what you say. Resell value is important when buying a car or lots of other hardware - except my old PCs apparently

I was drawing a comparison between what car manufacturers expect from hardware re-sale - nothing except encouragement to buy one of their latest product - and what manuacturers of games software expect from their re-sales.

A car manufacturer is in the long-established position of sell once and move on as a person dedicated to buying only second hand cars is never going to buy a new one. He'll buy an old one, wear and tear and all.

Software manufacturers expect something different due to their established 'licencing' mentality - thanks to good ol' Bill Gates setting the industry standard - and for them, anyone buying software is getting it 'new' however old the disc is. And they have a point if their costs are recovered from pricing based on that expectation. Every second hand sale is a loss to sales of their new discs.

Of course I'm not daft enough to think they really will reduce prices if they can jump on the re-licensing bandwagon. They'll take as much as people are prepared to pay for their games. Only real competition will affect that and with the high rate of games turnover and particularly the bottomless appetite for new console games the developers are laughing all the way to the bank.