Call of Duty doesn't glorify violence, it glorifies paintball. The vast majority of playtime on a game like COD is the multiplayer, where you get to say "Gottcha" every few seconds to your opponents. Nobody dies for real, they just get to play around with really realistic looking guns.
That said, I'd love to see a video game that approached subjects realistically, artistically, but in some sense to do so, you almost have to make an anti-game. It's hard to create something meaningful when the consequences are so light, especially in this era of games with auto-saves and instantaenous checkpoints. You almost have to make a game that forces you to start from the beginning when you fail; that would necessitate limitless, malleable endings, something to give the player a pay-off worth their restart. The world moves on without you, but you see how much impact you've made.
However, this business model will hurt consumers--and only consumers--on trade-ins and used sales. As someone who sells my used games online, I'll make even less money selling them than before, because I'll have to follow the same model as the retailers without the benefit of new game sales and paying ridiculously small amounts for trade-ins. It'll be nearly impossible to make any kind of profit, and even selling the game the first week it comes out, I would take a tremendous hit. As an example, I sold my first copy of Skyrim for $55 dollars two weeks after release (I gained an extra buck from shipping, but lost about five bucks in fees to the site). My guess is that in the new business model, reactivation of a game will cost $10-$15 dollars (I'm hoping in vain for $5, and I can't even imagine paying $20). That's $10-$15 dollars that I can't charge anymore, and you can kiss GameStop paying $30 in trade credit for recent games goodbye because they'll find a way to make the same profit. Gaming as a recriprocal money engine--buy games, sell games, buy more games--will be disturbed in ways that may actually end up harming sales across the board.
First of all, according to the rumor, the PS4 will not block used games--you will be able to use them as a demo until you unlock them by paying a fee. That means used games for the PS4 will have to be CHEAPER in order to compete with new copies--no one is going to buy a used game Basically, the only changes for the companies are that used games stores will pay less for used games, charge less for used games, more people will buy new games, and Sony/developers will get a cut of the used game market when those who choose to fully activate the game do so, and that won't be everyone. Consumers will end up paying roughly the same for used games in the end, and that's a market certainty--there's no way we'll spend more on used games than on new games (at least not until they're out of print and rare). I'd rather a little more money go to the developers than to places like Game Stop. If you never sell your games, this model works great and hurts noone
Umm, there is frankly a difference between paying for content you already own--paying more for on-disc content (can't call it DLC because it's not) is frankly a rip-off and is not the same as paying to download it (I refuse to buy single items like a special gun or something like that that could have been included in the game).
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