The death of used games - Sony files patent, MS expected to follow.

[Hoofbite]

Originally Posted by Achilleslastand

Heres my problem with steam....
If you by a retail version from a brick and mortar store you are also paying for the shipping of said product from point a to b as well as the printing manufacturing costs of the disks,boxes and any manuals included for lets say 49.99.
The same purchase on steam the only thing you get is the serial key for the same price. The costs involved dont include what i listed in the previous paragraph.
The developer/publisher/steam is able to take a bigger slice of the pie with none of the savings being passed on to the consumer.

All that stuff is pretty much nothing for the manufacturer. Is there a tax on steam purchases? Time spent going to the store? Gas?

These would all be savings, IMO. I'm not sure the few quarters it costs for the discs, cases and booklets is worth getting riled up about. I'm guessing the distributor pays a little bit for the bandwidth of distributing GBs worth of game files times however many customers there are.

[Hoofbite]

Originally Posted by davidyee

...hardware or software?

Likely both. I suppose that could all be thrown in prior to production but who knows.

Also, if it's just an RFID chip, whats to say that a game doesn't come into close enough proximity with a demo console and completely shut the game down?

[tupperware]

Originally Posted by Achilleslastand

Heres my problem with steam....
If you by a retail version from a brick and mortar store you are also paying for the shipping of said product from point a to b as well as the printing manufacturing costs of the disks,boxes and any manuals included for lets say 49.99.
The same purchase on steam the only thing you get is the serial key for the same price. The costs involved dont include what i listed in the previous paragraph.
The developer/publisher/steam is able to take a bigger slice of the pie with none of the savings being passed on to the consumer.

And you'll make up for that 10 fold when they put up their ludicrous sales of $50 titles for $10.