The RIAA has given Google bad marks for its fight against piracy in 2011, according to this Ars Technica report. One year ago Google made several promises to combat piracy on various web sites and the RIAA's report card says that those promises have not been met with swift action or progress.

GRIN, who you may know best as the creator of Capcom's Bionic Commando action game, claims that it went bankrupt due to an insane relationship with Square Enix. The company had been working on a "Nordic themed" Final Fantasy spin-off which never came to fruition. The company spoke out (to Swedish publication Aftonbladet) about its relationship with Square Enix, and the picture it paints isn't a pretty one.

The spin-off codenamed "Fortress" never had a chance, according to GRIN founders Ulf and Bo Andersson, because Square Enix was erratic, unreasonable, and contrary in its dealing with GRIN. GRIN says that Square Enix didn't pay any of the $20 million contract it had with the studio to develop the game, even though it met every milestone it was supposed to right up until it went bankrupt in August 2009.

We often hear publishers bemoan the fact that they don’t see any revenue from used game sales. But is that really true?

In a recent interview with IGN, Game Crazy’s Director of Used Games Marc Mondhaschen says that publishers are reaping benefits from game trade-ins, albeit indirectly:

We did a study not too long ago for a very large vendor who we managed to figure out for them 20 percent of their sales inside the first 28 days were paid for with trade dollars. So you got 20 points of their sales that wouldn't happen unless we had a trade business going. And that's specialty retail. Game specialty retail is maybe a third of the channel, 35 percent of the channel. So you got 10 percent of your sales that wouldn't happen unless somebody was out there trading games with your customers.

And if you didn't have specialty retail it would be pretty hard to sell innovation into the channel at all. I mean, Wal-Mart doesn't really buy Katamari Damacy. So, in order to innovate, in order to grow innovation in the business you need a specialty games retailer that actually knows something about videogames. And in order to have them, they need the margins through used games...

Mondhaschen explains that while publishers don’t typically see any money from used game sales, they do benefit in other ways:

When The Lost and Damned came out we started selling a whole lot more Grand Theft Auto 4, both on the new side and on the used side. Which, then, sort of funds people's ability to go play L&D again...

-Reporting from San Diego, GamePolitics Senior Correspondent Andrew Eisen...

Eidos president Ian Livingstone (left) is the latest game industry exec to complain about used game sales.

The BBC spoke to Livingstone about the issue. Here are the Eidos exec's comments:

The pre-owned market is a serious problem, because there is no benefit to developers or publishers...

A shop makes a bigger margin on a pre-owned title, and can sell them six or seven times, so there is no incentive for them to reorder and the content creator gets no slice of the action.

GP: "No slice of the action," of course, is the operative phrase in Livingstone's mini-rant.

Frankly, I have no sympathy for the industry's used game whiners and even less when I remember that digital distribution is inching ever closer. When that happens, the publishers will be in the driver's seat.

Enjoy your used game savings while you can.

Via: gi.biz

A pair of video game websites weighed in on the controversy over used game trades this week.

Crispy Gamer serves up a well-reasoned two-parter by David Thomas:

The price of a game is, at the end of the day, exactly the balance point between what someone is willing to pay and what someone is willing to sell... The trouble is, the publisher wants back in on the deal, and goes out of its way to convince you that it still owns a piece of that junk you bought from it...

 

The used market, it turns out, isn't screwing [game] publishers... Instead, the used market helps keeps people in the game by letting them play games that they wouldn't otherwise bother buying... Used games help make game fans out of game tourists...

Meanwhile, Destructoid's Jim Sterling has a bit of a rant on the topic:

Have you considered what happens to a publisher when you buy a secondhand game? They lose money! Oh, you might argue that publishers already make money off the original sale of the game, but they don't! In fact, whenever a secondhand game is bought, the original $60.00 transaction disappears from our corporeal plane of existence, erased from history as if it never happened...

The main issue with secondhand games is that no other industry ever has to deal with a similar problem. Think about it -- have you ever bought a used car, or even heard of a store selling used clothes or music? Of course you haven't! The very idea is preposterous...

The unexpected gamer protest against Valve's E3 announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 has left more than a few obervers perplexed.

Add the name of G4's Adam Sessler to the list of those who don't get what the whining is about. On his latest Soapbox segment Sessler takes the L4D2 protesters to task:

We're going down that path again - this shocking, amazing sense of entitlement that always manifests itself in the gaming community... Valve does not have a habit of screwing people and if there was ever a developer out there I would just kind of give them the benefit of the doubt...

 

They don't owe you anything. It's a business... Where were you brought up and in what environment where you hugged so overwhelmingly that you feel that you need to be served as the only person that needs to be considered when other people are making commercial properties? It really is a little bit on the naive side and slightly embarrassing... It's kind of juvenile... The Internet, when it comes to games, can be such a nation of whiners...

Via: Gaming Today