As a gamer, I am glad that someone took the initiative at all. Call me crazy, but isn't it a GOOD thing that a publisher is fighting for your rights? How often do you see this?

I haven't seen Stardock fighting for my right of resale, in fact I have seen them speak against it. So clearly they are not fighting for my rights.

Sorry Craig, but I don't know everyone here. Your previous post made it sound like you were part of the company "our customers", now you seem to be indicating this has nothing to do with you and you are happy someone else did it. Could you clear that up?

I acknowledged in my posting above that Stardock practices, as far as they go, are good ones. Indeed they are better than most.

But there is a clear conflict of interest limiting how far they go with the "Gamers Bill of Rights", that really isn't. It is a list of Stardock policy.

If the Auto/Petrol industry wrote regulation for themselves we would still be burning leaded gas and belching clouds of smoke. I for one am very happy we don't have the Exxon/GM clean air act.

The conflict of interest in the Stardock "Gamers Bill of Rights" is just as evident as it would be in the Exxon/GM "clean air act".

I am a gamer, a developer, and a supporter of Stardock's Bill of Rights Initiative.

Saying you are a gamer in this context is irrelevant. That is about as relevant as the Authors of the above mentioned Exxon/GM clean air act saying, "you can trust us, we breathe air too".

What matters, in this context, is that you are a producer of goods and you agree with another producer/distributor(your distributor in fact) about a set of policies. That is hardly surprising, to the contrary it is entirely expected.

OTOH, I am a consumer, on the other side of the fence in this equation. Understandably, my viewpoint is different and I am looking for more rights than what Stardock would suggest I deserve. In fact the main one seems to be a right I am legally entitled to: You know that pesky little thing known as the right to resell my copy of a copyrighted work. I am sure you have heard of the first sale doctrine:

The first sale doctrine states that once a copyright owner sells a copy of his work to another, the copyright owner relinquishes all further rights to sell or otherwise dispose of that copy. The Supreme Court first adopted the first sale doctrine in the case of Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908). In that case, the Supreme Court held that the exclusive right to sell copyrighted works only applied to the first sale of a copyrighted work. 210 U.S. 339, 349-350. While the copyright owner retained the underlying copyright to the expression fixed in the work, the copyright owner gave up his ability to control the fate of the work once it had been sold.

While you join EA in the fight against lawful resale, there is no way that Stardocks "Gamers Bill of Rights" is anything of the kind. It is just a transparent renaming of Stardock policy. That may sound harsh, but frankly I feel insulted by the repeated assertions that there is no conflict of interest in the content producer/distributor defining the rights of the consumer. Wake me when you include the right of resale or anything beneficial to the consumer that is not already Stardock policy.

You seem to have a general mistrust of corporations, and in a way I can't blame you. However, there are good companies out there that do want to make a difference. It is a true shame you can't recognize a friend when you are surrounded by enemies. Your so busy swinging we're all bound to get hit.

Stardocks fight against the right of resale speaks for itself. They are not on the gamers side. They are on the same side as EA here.

I have zero interests in game "rentals" that involve any activations servers at EA, or Steam, or Impulse. They all present a the same future point of failure issues. Company failure, company disinterest in maintenance (see Yahoo,Walmart, Microsoft DRM music servers). Also the effects of acquisitions and consolidations in the industry. EA could purchase Stardock. Any remote server dependencies means you just paid for a rental of unknown term.

Stardocks boxed games I will consider when they hit the bargain bin. Because I won't pay full price for games with limited or no resale. From what I have read so far, patches are limited to the first owner, this drastically reduces the resale value to a second owner.

If publishers reduce or remove resale value, that lowers the overall value of the product to the consumer. When the price falls to what I consider fair for a product with no resale value, then I will consider it. If there is actually a game I am interested in playing.

But gog.com will be something I support with my money. 100% free and clear of DRM/Activations etc and they have some old classics I want play.

A lot of your argument comes from inaccurate information.

This isn't true. EA puts DRM on the games themselves and says you can only install it on 3 (well, now 5) different PCs. Stardock puts no DRM on the games and basically allows you sell your disk and the buyer won't need to jump through any hoops or worry about any activation limits when installing it. He can then re-sell it again, and the third user won't need to worry about anything either. You can't even reasonably compare the two.

None of this is true with Stardock. If you buy a disc, you never need to activate it to play. There's absolutely no protection on it of any kind. You can install it from the disc on a permanently offline PC and never have to worry about any activations.

"Company disinterest" is not a valid scenario because this is all that Stardock does. Unlike Yahoo which tried to dabble in the music distribution business and decided to drop it, this is all that Stardock does, so they can't just decide one day that they're not going to do it anymore.

EA can't buy Stardock. Stardock is a private company.

As I wrote in a post above, do you typically spend money without getting anything in return? Do you keep MMO subscriptions for games you never, ever play? Do you pay any membership fees to places/sites you never, ever go to?

Patches and constant post-release support costs a lot of money. Is it not natural for them to want to get something back from spending it? They don't see a penny from your re-sale, but now all the support they paid to give you they now have to pay to give another user who they got nothing from. How does this work?

If us ordinary customers frown on spending money without any returns on the investment, how can we reasonably expect otherwise from any company? And again, the difference is they're not saying hey we won't allow you to sell your disk by making it not work, we just want to make sure that our spending is proportionate to how many copies we sell. There's nothing sinister about it.

Furthermore, Stardock is the only company I know that allows you to go to a store, buy a disc, and then be allowed access to the digital download of that game forever. I am not sure if Valve/Steam treat boxed versions of their Source-based games this way, but if they do then that's two companies. That's a huge plus to the buyer and one of the major reason why the serial is non-transferrable - its use is quite different from a common cd key to install the game. Many of us are far less concerned with resale than we are with security of purchase. With Stardock, losing the disc is nothing because you can always re-download. With other companies, we'd have to go and buy it again.

They're free and clear of everything *because* they are old classics. They are no longer supported by their developers and publishers. I love GOG, and I already got several games from them. But be realistic here, you can't compare the two. GOG is a simple distributor, they don't provide tech support for these games (aside from making sure their own installer works and only getting games that they can run on Vista), they don't make patches for these games - and neither do the original publishers and developers. For all parties, it's pretty much pure profit.

--

Ultimately, if you don't agree with Stardock's stance then you don't agree and nobody can convince you otherwise. But I'm a big proponent of basing arguments on valid and accurate facts without twisting their meaning to suit your needs

When I refer to servers and activations WRT Stardock, it should be obvioius I am referring to Impulse downloaded games. All the remote server issues apply to Impulse purchases rentals.

Stardock being private doesn't mean EA can't buy, it means it is easier for EA to buy them, since they don't have to deal with shareholders. They just have to convince the major equity holders.

The fight aganst resale is just further attempt to control a product after it is already sold. That right is lost after the copy is sold. So not only is this anti-gamer, it isn't even lawful.

The argument about support/patches is specious. I have been gaming for over 20 years and so have a lot of my friends. I never heard of anyone I know even calling support in all that time, so please. As far as patches. What differences does it make if a few games change hands and a few more patches are downloaded. It would be zero issue if the patches were free to download and not held to prevent resale. This is completely circular reasoning.

I am not twisting anything here. I am just arguing against the specious claim that Stardock policies renamed equals a gamers bill of rights. It doesn't. They are gaping holes that make that clear.

It makes it quite a bit harder because they'd have to deal with Brad. And he's made it very clear that he will not sell the company and let someone else tell him how he's going to run it.

We're not fighting anything. We know we can't stop people from reselling the disc, and we don't try. But given that ongoing support is an ongoing expense and done entirely at our option, we've got every right to distribute it on our own terms.

The product should be solid out of the box. But as with any used product, if someone's going to pay less than full price for it why should they expect to get it in exactly the same condition and with all benefits of a new one? You don't buy a used car with 60,000 miles on it and expect to get a warranty from the manufacturer for the next 60k just because the first owner had one. Getting the full warranty (or one at all) is an added value of buying new.

Sort of true. But then, if you're willing to go with a Digital Download, then it shouldn't be a big stretch that you have no issue with activation.

But if you're not, then you're given the option of getting the box (which includes digital download rights too) and you remain worry free about any re-activation upon installation.

As it stands at the moment, if you re-install from an archive of a digital download, you do have to log in to Impulse. But as it also stands, Stardock is actually looking at ways to remove this necessity, and if they can make a system that will sufficiently please the other publishers selling through Impulse, even their digital downloads will be immune from the "what if" possibility.

Who is asking for another warranty? If you buy a car with 30 000 miles on it, you get the balance of the warranty.

If you sell 10 000 copies and 1 000 change hands you still have only 10 000 copies out there. This really strikes me as a complete red herring. What difference does it make if it is the original owner downloading patches or if he stops and sells the game to another and that person is downloading, same support (or a slight trivial increase).

Every time I hear this it seems like nothing but greed backed rationalization.

Consumer preference: Gamer A gets tired of a game, decides to sell it to gamer B, thus recouping something and Gamer B gets a lower price. Win-win for both consumers.

Corporate preference: Gamer A is tired of game so he should just throw it in the closet and get zero value returned and game B should pay full price. Lose-lose for both consumers. But win for the corporation. Two copies sold and only one being played.

I think Stardocks policies are among the best in the industry, but they do not constititue any kind of consumer bill of rights, because of obvious conflicts like the above.  My annoyance stems not so much from Stardock policies, but from the pretension that this conflict of interest doesn't exist when it is so blindingly obvious. Suggesting there is no such conflict is insulting to the intelligence of all involved.

I personally think #10 is the best.

But if you sell a million copies? Even if on average it costs $5 (number out of nowhere, obviously) to support each copy, and a million copies change hands, they now spend another $5 million on support without seeing any revenue from the 1 million new users.

True that at any one time you have the same number of copies regardless of how many times it's re-sold, but they would still potentially spend multiple times to support the same copies.

If you have an installation issue and you contact support, that time does cost them money. If you re-sell and the new user has installation problems and contact support, it costs them money again for the same thing. Keep going in the chain..

I personally doubt it's a lot of money per person. But take ~3.3 million users potentially reselling over the years, and the new ~3.3 million again reselling. Even small amounts per person add up to a lot of money when enough users are involved.

So, if you loathe the idea of essentially wasting your $40-$50 if you get tired of a game, again how do you expect a company not to loathe wasting millions when their millions of users "get tired"?

This "conflict of interest" mainly exists because we as consumers tend to be very hypocritical. We want to do exactly what we want and we hate the idea of wasting money, and yet we don't want to allow companies to have the same ideology and expect them to be OK with wasting money because, presumably, they have a ton of money to waste to begin with (even though by comparison with paying $40 for a game, most of us have a ton to waste as well).

You are building a ridiculous house of cards out of "what ifs" here. Do you work for these guys?

First the amount of copies that actually changes hands is quite small as is the number of people who call support lines to install a game. Probably on the order of 5% each or less. 5%x5% is a very small number.

That you (and/or Stardock) think the customer is being hypocritical for not being concerned that it will add pennies in support cost to support proper resale rights is irrelevant to my point that such conflicts do exist. Belittling the consumer about his concerns doesn't make them go away. This is exactly why consumer rights don't belong in the hand of the producer. That leads to a one sided (producer favorable) set of rights that are obviously nothing more than the producers policies renamed.

Personally I'm very pleased with number one. If my computer meets or exceeds the minimum requirements as stated on the box, I expect that the game will work on my system. If it doesn't, I want a refund.

The current return policy for opened computer software is analogous to going to a restaurant, buying a meal and then discovering you are allergic to one of the ingredients. If you didn't know, and the chef didn't know, it's really nobody's fault. But at the same time no one in their right mind is going to expect you to pay for that meal.

I also will cheer the virtues of number 4, which basically flips the bird to Steam.

Number two is also a BIG one that I like. One of my favorite games, Star Wars: Battlefront 2, still has a gameplay glitch that has not been solved in a single patch since the game was released. It's only a minor annoyance, but it speaks volumes about the lack of commitment developers have to actually fixing bugs. Jephir is correct when he says games are abandoned. I have a stack of cool games with big problems because the developer just doesn't care enough to fix them.

In the wake of that mini-rant, I'd like to add number 11 to the list, which might even replace number 10 because I really have no problem with that one.

11. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games with bugs or glitches will continue to be supported, updated, and fixed even if the original developer that made the game is bought out by, or merges with another company or developer.