The goal of any (for profit) enterprise is to make money. This is written into law in the United States (it’s called “fiduciary duty”, and it exists to protect the shareholders.) Under the traditional scheme of things, the normal process is that you build a better mousetrap (or lots of really cheap mousetraps), then you sell it at a price that will make you the most money: a single $1000 mousetrap and a thousand $1 mousetraps will have the same impact on your bottom line, so you need to find the happy medium that will make the most money.
The software industry has adopted a different model, however, one that other entertainment and digital content industries are trying hard to emulate. In 1908, the Supreme Court recognized the so-called First-sale doctrine, which was later codified in copyright law in 1976. In essence, the doctrine allows someone who has purchased a copyrighted work to sell that particular copy of the copyrighted work without the copyright holder’s permission and without the copyright holder gaining any further compensation. This is why publishers are unable to halt the legal trade of used books, movies, music and some software (especially games, console games in particular.) The software industry managed to do a partial end-run around the first-sale doctrine by changing the verbiage from one of a “sale” to one of a “license”. Even there, however, they couldn’t completely subvert the 1976 law, they could only make it more cumbersome.
The software industry has been complaining about piracy for a very long time now, and unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted materials is certainly a problem. That said, it is a large mistake on the part of software manufacturers to count every pirated copy of their software as a would-be sale. The majority of software pirates would rather go without than pay for content. Many more would be willing to pay if the price were somewhat reasonable. But a full discussion of software piracy – and its prevention – is not the focus of this post.
As mentioned before, the primary goal of any for-profit company is to make money, and the highly-competitive software industry is particularly draconian in extracting as much cash as they can. Until recently, their efforts have focused on reducing piracy (primarily by punishing honest users, but that’s another rant.) Capcom, however, just upped the ante. They are going after the perfectly-legal resale market by making a game that is effectively un-resellable. To make matters worse, the game in question is one with a fairly linear storyline: once you’ve played it, you’ve played it. You might want to play it a few more times, but it’s not an “infinitely replayable” game the way the Civilization games or Nethack are.
What Capcom is doing is tied to a particular console, using a proprietary cartridge rather than a disk or hard drive. The game only allows for a single save game file, and this save game file cannot be deleted. Once part of the game is unlocked, it is permanently unlocked and cannot be reset. In other words, while the game can be re-sold, it will be re-sold as an already-completed and unlocked game with no opportunity to reset. If you want the full game experience, you’ll have to buy it new.
It may be legal, but it’s also a sleazy move, and one that will tend to encourage piracy rather than legal purchase. There is solid evidence that the publishing industries lose more money to second-hand sales than to piracy, but this is clearly a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Capcom sees it as a way to ensure a solid revenue stream. The gaming community sees the cost of the game as 100% sunk and unrecoverable, and therefore a bad investment. I don’t see any winners in this scenario. Sadly, Capcom is too stupid to see it that way.
