Comments on: None of Us are Entitled to Free Next-Generation Game Upgrades https://www.rectifygaming.com/nobody-is-entitled-to-free-next-generation-game-upgrades/ Sat, 16 Dec 2023 19:52:11 +0000 hourly 1 By: Somebody_Else https://www.rectifygaming.com/nobody-is-entitled-to-free-next-generation-game-upgrades/#comment-28503 Sat, 26 Feb 2022 14:27:06 +0000 https://rectifygaming.com/?p=113519#comment-28503 Not paying for work is not fair or reasonable.
Though taking a completed game (or other software) anywhere from 2 – 10+ years later and porting it to a current platform, which is relatively easy if the new platform is at least as capable as the previous one, and the developers built for the future. Building for the future means that all text and speech are in easily replacable files, and the text systems support single and double byte characters, and the sourcecode with documentation is kept as well as all the original art and other materials created with/for the software.
(Believe it or not, there are companies that have screwed that up many times, including Square Enix among others.)
And then they want those of us who already own the game to pay full current retail price for the new platform version, and it it’s rather likely that will be more than what you paid for it the first time, in some cases double that!
That isn’t fair or reasonable either, but lots of companies do exactly that.

Then of course there’s the situation where a game is made to function on multiple generations of a platform at the same time. The development cost is a single total price for both platforms, and it’s not double because they have all those things later ports require if built for the future. (Ok, maybe they screwed up the text & speech because they stupidly ignored language localization, but it doesn’t change the other bits.)
The companies expecting you to buy at full price twice for the two generations of platform, isn’t fair either, they certainly didn’t do twice the work, and it won’t be played by twice the users, and the users value of the game doesn’t increase either.
So again it’s not fair or reasonable to expect them to pay twice.
Now a $10 “fee” for getting multiple seems reasonable, even though duplication of digital products is significantly cheaper than that, even if you go for the physical media.
Some companies are trying to increase their products desirability and mindshare by giving that away for free with the purchase of the other version. Others are doing it to help push the adoption of a new platform. (I don’t think there are any of those right now.)
Some companies are after a reasonable fee that helps them stay in the black. (Financial term, if you don’t know it, google it )
But there are some bad actors that want a significant percentage or even 100% price of the product again, even though they are providing no real value to the users.

There is no starkly defined line of right and wrong here. There are people on one end that want stuff for free and will whine if they don’t get it, while on the other end are the companies that only care about squeezing the most money possible out of the users. Most people and companies are somewhere in between those two.

]]>