Why Game Developers Should Shut Up About Used Games 590
Ssquared22 writes "It may feel like a rip-off to some, but you've got to admit that paying $30 for Gears of War 2 sure beats paying $60! Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them, and companies like Gamestop continue to laugh all the way to the bank. In an article at Crispy Gamer, David Thomas dissects one of the most critical issues in gaming today: used games and merchants (online and brick-and-mortar) who specialize in this 'sleight of hand.'"
Make up your minds: product or license? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a simple case of seller's remorse. They lure you to the table with the advertising that you are buying a product. A physical good you can re-use, re-cycle, trade, sell, etc. And they make you pay a premium price for that product.
Then they whine that you are trading, re-using, selling and undermining their sales. What they really wanted was for you to pay a product price ($60) for a license.
It's pretty clear that the free market (blockbuster) has established the value of a license at $3-$5 per week. But I don't think the game studios would be happy if they sold ten million physical copies on launch day for $5 a pop either.
Re:They can stop it: Installs locked to hardware. (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft already addresses this issue by allowing you to Download your gamertag to only one Xbox 360 at a time. So if you go to your friends house you can DL your gamertag and all of your "Xbox live arcade games" can now be played on your friends xbox. Of course your home Xbox will now not be able to play them until you redownload your gamertag to your Xbox 360.
So it is very possible that this will become a reality because it already very much is on Xbox Live. Its a HUGE pain in the ass tho.
Sony is actually better about it. If you buy a game on PSN, you can install it on your PS3 and your friends and both of you can even play the game at the same time on both your consoles.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:5, Interesting)
I wont. I'm done paying full retail for games. I buy lots of games when they hit the $19.95 mark. almost no games I own cost more than that. I refuse to pay the stupid $70.00 each for a game. that's nuts.
but then I also am the guy that pisses off the EB clerks and got Fallout 3 for $20.00 when they offered the guy turning it in $10.00 for it.
I slapped the guy a 20 and he gave me the game. I left before the pimple faced manager could stop choking on his burger to yell at me.
Re:They can stop it: Installs locked to hardware. (Score:2, Interesting)
I think most of us, even if we don't regularly buy things on steam are agreeable to binding a purchase to an account. I wish microsoft would adopt this logic so I could easily manage and transfer my licences between machines and so on.
From there publishers need to dramatically drop (or even zero) the price of older titles as they move on to sequels (or new IP). There's really not much point in charging 20 or 30 bucks for assassins creed or bioshock now. If the put them on games for windows live, steam, impulse, direct2drive gamersgate etc for 5 or 10 bucks, or even 0 and just said go torrent it they would have more people lined up for the sequels and ready to pay full price. The only people who pay full price for anything are the impatient ones, myself included, they need to grow that market, they're not likely to get much from anyone else no matter what.
Re:They can stop it: Installs locked to hardware. (Score:5, Interesting)
You could, in theory, just sell your steam account itself to someone else. Of course, this means selling the entire collection of games in your account so you can't pick and choose. You could just set up a different account for each game you wanted to buy though.
Re:They can stop it: Installs locked to hardware. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's coming. I'll bet the next consoles have 'features' that prevent game resale. They think people will buy no matter what. I've been gaming for 25 years and I will not buy a game that I can't bring over to a friends' house. And no, giving your friend your PSN or Xbox Live info so they can download the game onto their console isn't the same. Takes too much coordination, time, and it could even cost money if your friend is on metered broadband.
Same solution to whining as always (Score:2, Interesting)
The entities complaining that used game sales are costing them money need to do the same thing as all whiners - face the reality, and do something that actually has a shot of working.
Enough with this trying to cherry-pick the characteristics of physical and non-physical products that suit your current business model the best.
In the case of used game sales, they simply need to get in on the action. Forget resale of discs; that's a lost cause. In the near future, even where those items still exist, they'll be linked to an account anyway.
They need to get in on resale of digital purchases. Say I'm done with a game I bought on Steam. I put my "copy" of the game up for sale, for some percentage of the current "new" price. Some other user decides to buy it, and pays that price. I get a substantial chunk of it in credit - at least half. The rest gets split between the publisher and Steam. The publisher and the developer can then work out what they do with that bit.
Mind you, eventually I'd like to see an end to paying for individual games at all. Instead, I pay a monthly subscription, and play whatever games I want. In turn, the developers for those games get a percentage of my subscription fee, based on how much I (and other subscribers) play their game.
Re:Contracting (Score:5, Interesting)
We should try to extend this to music especially downloaded music. Why is it that I can sell a used CD but, in some coutries, I can't sell a used iPod full of legally downloaded music? I suppose that's a definitive advantage of buying the CD vs downloading (on top of the quality).
Re:Already have it for music (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not sure I have seen anyone mention it before, but your post makes me think of an idea Apple could possibly capitalize on and crush even more competition.
Let's called it the "used" section of the iTunes store. Let's say you bought some tunes and some of them you felt were just horrible. Tough luck, you're stuck with them. However, what if you could log into iTunes and mark those tracks as "for sale". Apple could probably either get away with fixing a resale value or letting you determine your own. They then could take a small percentage of the resale (the claim being for storage and bandwidth) when someone buys it. Once the purchase happens, your copy is wiped/deactivated as a playable tune.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong!
The real solution is to sell games that I would want to continue playing longer than 3 months. If I wanted to continue playing it (because it is still fun), then I don't want to sell it. If I don't want to sell this fun game, there will be no used game market. If there is no used game market, the next game I want, I will buy brand new.
Or the game developers can keep pushing the same old crap and complaining about their customers.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a lost sale because the purchase price of the new game includes the resale value of that same game when it becomes used.
In other words, they get to charge such high prices because users can sell the game later and recoup some of the loss.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:4, Interesting)
but then I also am the guy that pisses off the EB clerks and got Fallout 3 for $20.00 when they offered the guy turning it in $10.00 for it.
I slapped the guy a 20 and he gave me the game. I left before the pimple faced manager could stop choking on his burger to yell at me.
Hell dude, I used to do that as a Gamestop employee.
We did it all the time. New game comes out, we wait for someone to trade it in. No manager around means, "Hey man, the store will give you X dollars in store credit. I'll (as in me personally) will give you the same value in cash."
So, by my book, you paid twice as much as you needed to for Fallout. If the guy turning it wanted to get cash from the store, he'd have gotten $8.00. Hahahaha.
Man, I remember I got a PS2 for trade in value in cash, I bought a portable LCD screen that clicks onto a Gamecube for I think $35 (and the store was going to turn around and price it for $135!!!).
Neon Genesis Evangelion box set for like $60... I sold a brand new Gamecube that I won from a convention to a customer for face value (but no tax so they saved like $20 or whatever)...
And again, this was common practice. Local management looked the other way. Upper management wouldn't have.
It's unrelated, but I feel like telling it: the best was when GTA: Vice City came out.
Hype for GTA:VC was so ridiculously overblown (I remember having to make over 400 reservation phone calls before Gamestop started using automation) that we actually took reservations for the first three shipments of the game. Of course, it's worth noting here that this was kind of ridiculous to begin with because only about 70% of that first shipment's reservation holders will actually pick up, so at some point it was always inevitable that we'd get the go ahead to sell to walk-ins before we began satisfying second shipment reservations...
Anyway, on release day, I got a phone call:
"Hello, will you guys be selling second shipment reservations today?"
"No, first shipment only. Sorry."
"What if I gave you $50?"
So I gave the guy my name and told him to ask for me when he came in, sold him the copy and came up $50 richer. I used this to justify my purchase of the game's soundtrack that night when I also picked up my copy of the game.
The next day, when I came into work, there was a lot of hushed talk about the POS screwing up transactions yesterday. It turned out that whenever someone paid for a transaction on a debit card, the register would actually charge them for whatever value the most recent credit card transaction was charged. For some people it worked out to their disadvantage and if they came and complained we reimbursed them. Some people came out ahead and they got a walk. I was one of those people and I came up about $50.
And it still makes me smile.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:4, Interesting)
Why isn't anyone asking the REAL question? (Score:4, Interesting)
Game companies should progressively lower prices
They actually do, with their re-releasing of hit titles for about half price. This actually started partly to curb the used game market.
But why isn't anyone asking why games are so expensive in the first place? If supply and demand are suppose to govern the market price, then where there is unlimited supply, there should be aggressive price competition to lure in business. Yet, with games (and music), you find indifference.
I thought this was called price fixing and was illegal.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:4, Interesting)
Enjoy it while it lasts.
The summary says Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them.
Don't bet on it. C&C:4 will require a constant Internet connection to play. How long do you think it will be before other games follow? And how long do you think it will be before most games have something like Microsoft's so-called Genuine Advantage, where each game comes with a serial number that must be validated before the game will play? Once that serial number is registered, selling the CD doesn't do any good at all. And game companies are under no obligation to allow you to transfer that serial number to someone else. Register the serial number with the server via your PC or with your XBox live account or your PS3 Online account and the media becomes worthless. In fact, they could simply give the game disks away and require you to pay online to receive an activation number or token.
Sure, the system can probably be cracked and it won't stop all piracy, but it will stop legal used games sales in its tracks.
Goodbye Gamestop, we hardly knew ye.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:4, Interesting)
The solution, I think, is something that'll never come to pass: a waiting period on trading in games.
Solution? What's the problem?
Not everything should be a compromise, especially when talking about freedoms. People have the right to resell something they own.
Ultimately, this isn't a huge issue, but it could exasperate other issues that might be more critical.
It's certainly not an issue. Do you think renting is a "huge issue" as well? Because it's pretty much the same thing.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:5, Interesting)
"If no one wants to pay for them, no one wants them produced."
BS. If all of those songs, movies, and games weren't wanted, then the whole P2P thing wouldn't exist. Pirates WANT the games, they just don't want to pay for them.
Which means in my book that they're not pirates, but parasites.
Re:They can stop it: Installs locked to hardware. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:3, Interesting)
Look, I'm totally against piracy, copyright violations or whatever you want to call it. I disagree with the copyright and patent laws as they exist today. I don't think that all casual copying hurts the creator, but I respect their right under the laws as they exist to enforce their rights and to demand payment. However, selling used games or DVDs or books whether you are a person, a store or a chain is still legal.
Game developers need to factor that into their business model and get on with it. If you can't sell enough copies of your big budget game to make a profit then you probably should decrease your budget. Frankly the fun I have playing a game never seems to correlate to the cost of creating it.
Take the movie industry. At some point people quit paying for movies and get to see them on T.V. for no extra cost. If the marketing is good enough and the movie lives up to some of the hype you whip up then you should be able to get more than enough people to pay to make a big profit. You do the math and then invest accordingly.
Consider used book stores (and libraries). Book publishers have had to work around their existence for centuries. It seems to work well enough.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:3, Interesting)
In one of those strange capitalist paradoxes, in terms of frames-per-second for your dollar you get massively more if you buy cheaper mid range hardware that has been on the market 6-12 months. For example, a Radeon 4870 was alot of money when it came out, following the 4850 was the 4830 which gets get you 90% of the same performance for alot cheaper.
If you waited a little longer now there is the 4770 which is slightly slower but a bigger step cheaper again, and naturally a more improved model also.
Incredibly if you wait a while the drivers mature, which is a free speed boost in some cases, and Crossfire/SLI support and scaling in games improves. I resisted my fanboy urges and I now have two Radeon 4770s for less than the price of a single 4870 on 0-day.
The other area is CPUs, not so crucial to gaming performance, but you don't want to be held back: Overclocking a sub $100 processor to the performance level of a $400 is now is so easy, reliable and cheap to do. You don't even need all those spiffy led-illuminated uber cooler parts either.
Frankly I don't buy any argument that PC gaming is much too expensive to be a part of, because it is possible to do so, for half the money and still have 90% of the ultra high-end experience. You'll retain bragging rights and have some points to stamp on your geek card from your overclocking skills. Wait... perhaps it is if you are a fan-boy early adopter because you will be fleeced.
this crud just makes me angry (Score:1, Interesting)
This is rediculous. If any other product said that you can't resell an item they would be laughed at. You know that Lazy-Z boy recliner you bought 8 years ago? No, you can't sell it to anyone. I don't care if they make up a bunch of crud that you don't really own the software - that's just dumb. If they are going to somehow *own* the software after I spend my money on it then they better send me updates and upgrades when my hardware upgrades. As soon as they start fixing all the software I 'leased' in the 80's and 90's then I might think about not reselling it.
Greed is greed - no matter how you label it.
BTW - I write software for a living.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of us 'pirates' don't want to pay for a bad piece of software.
I ahve pirated software, and if I used it, I bought. Otherwise I deleted it.
When I can take a piece of software back to the store and get cash back, I'll stop.
Also I ahve a few songs not available for sale anymore.
Oh, the same with TV shows. I downloaded the first season of Bones. I liked the show, so I bought the DVDs.
Years ago I would pirate by recording TV show as they were broadcast! Then I would watch them later, or lend them to friends , SHOCKING, I know.
The obnly pirates costing the studioes money are the guys mass produsing CDs and tghen selling them as legitimate.
As it turns out, most people don't mind paying a reasonable price for stuff.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:4, Interesting)
My point exactly, F/OSS gaming is so pathetic you actually put TuxRacer on the list.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to take GTA 4, and show you exactly why you are wrong.
If no one wants to pay for them, no one wants them produced. So if no one wants them to be produced... why should you produce them? (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
GTA 4 sold over 13 million copies. Obviously, people did want it produced. The issue is, of those 13 million people, how many people would individually have the $100 million it cost to produce, and would be willing to spend $100 million to have a game produced, if after it was produced anyone could copy it. Probably none.
They dont have to be produced if theres no market for them. (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
But there is a market for them, so long as they can't be freely copied so that the investors can get their money back. How else do games sell millions of copies.
How about stopping the production of the product until the people realize (all by themselves, with no censorship and mass punishment laws needed) that they really really really have to pay you to get it?
You should follow that up by wishing really really hard that you can really really alter human nature.
And by the way, the law absolutely doesnt prevent anybody to "duplicate" your product, it just fuck ups the lives (really badly) of the few poor fellas who happen to get caught. The silent majority just keeps copying because nobody, really nobody outside of the circles directly profiting from copying prohibition considers sharing, copying and passing on of culture even remotely wrong or illegal.
Bullshit. How many commercial vendors selling copied media exist and openly operate in the United States. None. How about in China? So the law doesn't work? You might want to reevaluate your notions.
I'll even go so far as to help you out with your next most obvious line of reasoning, and why that won't work.
You don't need one guy to fund it man. Everybody could throw in a little bit of money, man, like a coop, man, and people that had talent could add a little time, and they could work on a game idea. So there wouldn't be any profit man, it would just be totally community driven.
And what happens if the game sucks.
They could all just keep working on it.
Or in the alternative, you could allow investors to shoulder that risk, and in exchange be allowed the exclusive right to distribute and charge for the produced material. This way, if the game sucks, you don't have to spend any money on it. But if the game is good, you've got to give the investor some money to cover his cost, plus some to cover his risk, plus some to provide a return on his investment to encourage him to take the risk to begin with. Of course, if people could just copy it, the investor wouldn't be able to recoup the investment, so he wouldn't be able to do it. So maybe there could be some kind of law for that. But that kind of brings us full circle doesn't it.
Re:Great advertising for new versions! (Score:3, Interesting)
> All "rights" are artificially created.
Rights and laws usually originated from the people's cultural/natural sense of right and wrong. So what people at large thought was wrong (like stealing, killing each other) was somewhen cast into law as wrong, and what they thought was unobjectionble, wasnt. Thats how, in rough, this "democracy" was supposed to work.
Then "imaginary property" came into play. Sadly (only for the imaginary proprietors), since it isnt really a property in the physical property sense, it only works as a negation, i.e. you possess a bit of imaginary property not when you really possess something, but when everybody else _loses_ a right to do something. Since theres not only commercial businesses to get cash from, the imaginary proprietors conveniently extended their negation rights claims into everybody elses privacy, since, if i have to pay you money to solely for your allowance to do something in the privacy of my home, you win (and you win big, thats why a prominent proponent of imaginary property called it "the oil of 21st century").
So in order for this to work, practically everybody has to freely acknowledge those "imaginary rights" of a third party to disallow every of us a certain DIY item in order to be forced to pay them for the allowance. But unlike the most other agreements the society at large agreed upon as a basis of its functioning, which then subsequently were codified into specific laws, the society at large actually never agreed to collectively accept the concept of imaginary property as something beneficial for it. In contrary, the concept itself and the accompanying laws had always to be pushed "artificially", always from top down, by the minority profiting from them directly, going as far as making the whole law creation process a secret of allegedly national importance (ACTA).
So artificial = not based on a natural sense of right and wrong inherent to the majority of the people, but systematically designed by a system-gaming versed, profit-oriented minority.