All too true. You notice I've never once said "shut up and deal with it."?

I'm mostly offering the counterpoint to "RAAAAAARGH UBISOFT IS THE DEVIL! WE SHOULD BOYCOTT THEM BECAUSE THEY'RE SODOMIZING US!!!!" which, while paraphrasing, is what some people have basically been saying.

Well, you have to take into account that gamers, and people in general, tend to be pretty terrible at distilling down what actually bothers them and putting it into words without adding a heavy emotional component. Basically just read all the "RAGE!!!!" posts as over the top expressions of "I'm unhappy because Ubisoft is now offering me less value for my money, and as a result I may consider taking my business elsewhere."

I suppose you have a point. People are stupid. >.>

Online functionality is a central feature of the product, not a separate service. Ubisoft and others are trying to take this away to skim undeserved profits from used copies.

Should I pay Microsoft $10 to unlock Windows Update if I buy a used PC? After all, it's a service, right?

I think part of the issue is that a product and a service are bundled into a single purchase, which ends up making the issue fairly convoluted. It would simplify things quite a bit if the single-player game and online play were separated into two separate purchases: The single-player game offered for $40, and a multiplayer code then buyable for $10 (or perhaps a 30/20 split for games with less single-player and more multiplayer). Of course, this would then mean that people who are just interested in single-player aren't required to spend extra money on bundled functionality they aren't interested in, so naturally we won't see anything like this.

You already do. It is included in the price.

I really can't believe the amount of people supporting this.

When you buy a game, that's a copy you personally paid for to purchase said game. It's a one time transaction.

What you do with the game at that point has no bearing whatsoever with the game company. At all. It's already a one time payment for one copy transaction. If you then sell the game to someone else, that isn't changing the fact that the ownership of the game has changed to someone else. It is still a one to one transaction due to the same amount of copies of said game still existing within the transactions, IE, one. They've already received their payment for that service.

If you want to hide behind the "Servers cost a lot!" excuse for this, then we should go to a permanent server subscription model now instead of three years from now. Make it uniform and watch people abandon online multiplayer games that have it instead of some type of sneaky "Online tax" for a used game purchaser, or god forbid, someone who misplaces their online code for a game they just bought.

Fuck these game companies with this pass shit. The more companies adopting this policy, the more companies i refuse to buy games from. I dont play multiplayer enough to really give a shit. I'll continue to buy used because one, i can, and two because the amount of shit games released on a monthly basis requires me to. I will not spend 60 dollars for a 4 hour single player, period, i dont give a fuck if it has multiplayer or not. When companies start producing better games and stop the "we'll patch it after we've taken your money" bullshit then ill start buying new. Until then, fuck them, ill buy their game for 20 bucks 3 months down the road, and wont shed a single tear.

I don't agree. A movie is a product because you buy a disc that plays the movie. There is no service aspect. Same with a singleplayer game, you buy Bioshock and play the 12-16 hour game without any service aspect. Things like Steam and achievements try and put service-like aspects into singleplayer games but it's still fluff in the end, and they're basically still products you buy and possess in some form.

Online games are services. They rely on servers, on communities. They are inherently online-only and limited by a certain shelf-life. The company pays to support and monitor gameplay after the sale.

They are completely different things.

Of course, this could partially be mitigated if companies included LAN play in more of their games, or allowed people to run their own servers rather than having to rely entirely upon servers run by the game companies. Continued maintenance of servers by the game company isn't something that's inherently required for multiplayer games, but rather something that the game companies themselves have chosen.

No, it's really not, they made it into a service by disallowing LAN play and 3rd party servers. That's on them, no players demanded that and many desire the opposite. Additionally it's the only reason we're having this debate. It was step one in killing the second hand market.

This is their fault, don't be fooled by the rhetoric, it's full of equivocation and bullshit.

And there are services that offer lifetime use for a single payment, it's not as common as a subscription but it does exist.
What you see now isn't at all how it used to work, even as recently as a few years ago. At best officially recognized 3rd party servers could submit scores to a leaderboard type server. 3rd parties ran the communities, they ran the servers, nearly all of it was donated by 3rd parties free of charge for love of the game. Sometimes dev shops donated some of their own hardware/bandwidth to the cause, but it was diminutive in comparison.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is an excellent example (and I think the ill fated UT3 followed the same model, but was broken on release and missing servers for some platforms).

The current method of doing things is a direct result of the industry's poor and anti-consumer decisions.

Community-hosted servers are despised because this puts control of the experience in the hands of the players rather than the publisher. Sure, maintenance isn't free, but it gives publishers the ability to pull the plug whenever they feel like it, forcing players to buy newer games.

EA is particularly notorious for this, regularly shutting down multiplayer for games that are barely two years old--including many PC games. It's quite a long list.

If I buy a game, it is (should be) my property. This means that I can resell it if I want to. The developer doesn't (and shouldn't) see a penny of second hand sales.
Honestly.

If I buy a car and then sell it to someone, why should I give money to the manufacturer? It makes no sense whatsoever. It is my property and I can deal with it as I wish.

Wait, what? If you release a broken product you better fucking fix it.

With apologies for the vehemence of my post (swearing follows):

Only fucking game companies have the gall to think they're fucking special enough to deserve a cut of the second hand market. Why do they think they're somehow an exception to the rest of the fucking world? Used to be I didn't care much about it (because I really didn't give it much thought), but they can kiss my ass if they think I'm going to support their games when they implement this type of bullshit. They piss and moan about 'losing' money from second hand sales. I say stick it where the sun doesn't shine. They don't deserve a cut of second hand sales any more than any other industry. What the hell makes them think they're a special case?

Meh, probably the scotch talking here, but that's my two cents on this issue.