If You Resell Your Used Games, the Terrorists Win 423
MojoKid writes "Game designer Richard Browne has come out swinging in favor of the rumored antipiracy features in the next-gen PlayStation Orbis and Xbox Durango. 'The real cost of used games is the damage that is being wrought on the creativity and variety of games available to the consumer,' Browne writes. Browne's comments echo those of influential programmer and Raspberry Pi developer David Braben, who wrote last month that '...pre-owned has really killed core games. It's killing single player games in particular, because they will get pre-owned, and it means your day one sales are it, making them super high risk.' Both Browne and Braben conflate hating GameStop (a thoroughly reasonable life choice) with the supposed evils of the used games market. Braben goes so far as to claim that used games are actually responsible for high game prices and that 'prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells.' Amazingly, no game publishers have stepped forward to publicly pledge themselves to lower game prices in exchange for a cut of used game sales. Publishers are hammering Gamestop (and recruiting developers to do the same) because it's easier than admitting that the current system is fundamentally broken."
used or bust (Score:2, Insightful)
I buy ONLY used games for my XBox 360.
So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Horse hockey... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real secret for cutting down on reselling used games (can't eliminate it entirely) is to provide an incentive for the customer to retain it. New content, re-playability, tie in with future products that open new avenues of gameplay, rewards for brand loyalty, etc. You make a nice single player franchise, have there be some sort of in-game reward for owning other products, having played them, or even still having the original disc and manual.
Oh, and don't shit in your own sandbox when you go werewolf on the series - destroying everything and everyone just because you want it to be 'though provoking' when it all comes crashing down (looking at you Bioware / EA...).
You continue to make another Call of Duty / Battlefield clone with a crappy five hours of single player action to make a quick buck - your game will get resold to Gamestop, that's just a fact. Multiplayer 'passes' prevent resell of a multiplayer game, but it won't do donkey dick to prevent those who are tired of owning your product from selling it off. Just accept that this will happen if you make shitty games.
Ever bought a used car? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Mr. Browne has ever purchased a used car, borrowed a book, DVD, or CD, then he is a hypocritical schmuck.
I can't sell my steam games (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is true why isn't MW3 cheaper in Steam?
Re:used or bust (Score:2, Insightful)
Good luck with that...
The article author gets it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The game developers calling for a share of used market profits are advocating the death of First Sale doctrine in the name of perpetuating a doomed business model.
Maybe I should RTFA more often.
Perspective, people, perspective... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it, quite possibly, the case that used game sales are bad for aspects of the game creation business. However, the right of first sale is a fairly fundamental aspect of people actually being able to 'own' things. Guess what, guys: Even if your direst predictions are true, this is a case of video games vs. meaningful property rights. A sense of scale would be in order.
The same thing goes for assorted other 'IP' issues. Is piracy hurtful to the music and video industries? Quite possibly(though history suggests that their estimates of how much so should be taken with a grain of salt that would stun an ox...); but can that possibly matter more than such minor quibbles as 'due process' and 'innocence until proven guilty', which are trampled on by most of today's more enthusiastic anti-piracy schemes? Even if it were true that the whole damn industry would burn without such legislation, what of it?
That is what really gets to me. Yes, it is also true that these industries have a history of mendacity about the real damage inflicted by various things that they don't like; but that is a petty footnote: When it comes right down to it, the thing that they don't like(used game sales) is derived directly from a right more important than the entire video game industry. GameStop can rot in hell, they are a thoroughly parasitic and inefficient middleman; but meaningful ownership of property is far more important than video games, even if the direst predictions of their self-interested proponents are taken at face value.
Make up your fucking minds (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you selling us an object that we own, or are you asking us to pay you for convenient access to a system that you own?
You can't have it both ways.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
*whoosh*, as they say.
Appending "the terrorists win" to a sentence implies it's a load of bullshit, as popularized by countless anti-terrorism pundits since 9/11.
That doesn't make it any less stupid.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we can boycot the industry completely for a year. Make them feel the hurt & maybe they'll realize that they're not something important like, say, the food industry.
the only problem with that is the game publishers won't see it that way, they'll blame piracy.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is price. Again.
Most people don't have problems dropping $10-20 on a game. They do have problems with paying $60-70 for a game. It's not rocket science here.
If new games cost a third of what they were now I would suspect the used market would not be nearly as big.
They should take a hard look at themselves before whining. Honestly, if the new consoles are going to restrict used games, I won't buy one and find something else to do with my time.
I never buy games when they first come out (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is price. Again.
Most people don't have problems dropping $10-20 on a game. They do have problems with paying $60-70 for a game. It's not rocket science here.
If new games cost a third of what they were now I would suspect the used market would not be nearly as big.
They should take a hard look at themselves before whining. Honestly, if the new consoles are going to restrict used games, I won't buy one and find something else to do with my time.
The funny thing is, not only are they $60-70, they honestly aren't of the quality that some $20-30 "indy" companies like Nippon Ichi or XSeed put out, to say nothing about true indy games out there.
Seriously, I get that all that HD graphics and buying hookers and yachts for your CEO and the like are very, very expensive. But the $80 a game rumored price point for the Orbis and Durango titles is insane, and honestly, 99.9% of the titles for all 3 consoles are shovel-ware dressed up with marketing blitz.
If they want to fix game sales, make better games. Fire the executives who keep making shitty decisions. Stop being so goddamned "safe" (read: bland as hell) with your companies. If Notch had been working for a major design studio, there's no way in hell Minecraft would have ever been released.
We're going to hit a point very soon where it doesn't matter how much better the graphics get, the devs won't be able to develop for those, because we're not going to be willing to pay for $80-90 games with $50 of tacked on DLC.
Re:used or bust (Score:3, Insightful)
If you win and the system changes, sir, you are a patriot, but if you lose and the system remains, sir, you are a terrorist.
Re:Ever bought a used car? (Score:4, Insightful)
Car manufacturers do not get anything on resells. Nobody should. First sale doctrine and all that. And yes, I know that publishers claim that they license a right to use software instead of selling that right. But I rather suspect that all falls over when you want to exchange a scratched CD/DVD; you'll have to pay for the license all over again.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
The funnier thing is:
Gamestop wouldn't exist without used game sales.
Over 50% of first-day sales happen at Gamestop.
By trying to kill gamestop (and defraud consumers of their rights of a purchase) they're fucking themselves over.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. While the games aren't as complex/expensive to develop, Apple's App Store is a great example of this. People are making hundreds of thousands, millions, and occasionally tens of millions off games selling for $0.99 to $4.99. When the potential market is 25M+ machines, there is the potential to sell many millions of copies, if the price is below the "take a chance" impulse buy threshold.
Indeed, the App Store (and corresponding Android markets) may completely alter the way mass market software is priced and sold.
Re:Perspective, people, perspective... (Score:4, Insightful)
The content industries consider themselves a service industry or a product industry when it suits them. They want to sell it as a product and control it as if a service - you may have paid them but they still see it as "their" game.
Maybe someone is going to argue the same can be said of consumers, there's usually plenty of people bemoaning gamers' sense of entitlement for "their" game. But that's a pretty naive argument when the industry is pushing a "product" but then not applying the standards that are expected of a product. This goes well beyond first sale doctrine: substantially bug-free, complete, wholly owned and (in the UK at least) most retailers will refund any product without even asking for a reason.
It is also worth noting the success and general approval of the likes of Steam and MMO*'s, where gaming is sold as a service.
Consumers generally seem pretty happy when gaming is either a product or a service. As it stands, the industry tries to give them the worst of both.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not going to blame piracy any more than they would regardless. You have to remember that they're dishonest, not stupid. They know perfectly well what they're doing, and why they're doing it: Their goal is not to reduce piracy, it's to control the market. Making noises about piracy is just their way of excusing customer-hostile behavior calculated to achieve a dominant market position and exclude competitors from the market. Higher actual piracy rates or lower sales rates are totally irrelevant, because they just fabricate all the numbers anyway.
the only problem with that is the game publishers won't see it that way, they'll blame piracy.
I declare this meme officially over.
But there is a different problem. The problem is that boycotts don't work unless you're organized, and you're not. You and six of your friends staging a boycott is not going to make anyone care. A year from now when you're discontinuing your unsuccessful boycott having failed to modify their behavior, someone else will be announcing a new boycott that only they and their six friends will be ignored for participating in.
There is, however, an easy way to deal with this: Don't buy games with DRM. Ever. Period.
That isn't a boycott, it's a promise. And it's forever.
It's also a lot easier to hold yourself to, because there are plenty of DRM-free games made by developers who don't disrespect their paying customers by assuming they're criminals. Adopting this policy is actually advantageous to you, regardless of its consequences on game developers, because you then never have to deal with the failures of DRM. And sooner or later, as more and more people discover how easy and satisfying it is to adopt and stick to a policy of never, ever buying games with DRM, the developers who use DRM will either abandon it or go out of business. Problem solved.
Re:yes, Braben (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely wrong. Used items should be illegal. For instance, used cars should be banned; everyone should instead buy brand-new cars, keep them for 2-3 years, then drive them straight to the junkyard to be crushed, and go buy a new car. There's no reason to think all present car owners can't afford that. Used car sales are bad for the market.
[/sarcasm in case it wasn't obvious]
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
Not for me. The hatred and fear I feel for people who try to keep me from reselling stuff I bought from them has far exceeded it. They want a future where I own nothing but merely "lease" things, for full price of course. They are public enemies and should be treated as such and stopped before this madness spreads to other industries.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, I know a fair number of people who have been boycotting the industry since the day they discovered Kazaa...
Right or wrong, when game companies do shit like this, that is where they're driving their customer base. Why boycott when you can just rip the fucking game off and play it for free? Are people supposed to feel bad about doing that when the industry itself is treating them like they're doing it anyway? I mean, you keep calling your 12 year old daughter a whore, by the time she's 16, odds are, she's going to be a whore.
The game industry treats it's customer base like an abusive parent treats their children, and they're shocked when the kids finally have had enough and disappear? Please. Not even these masters of the universe can be that fucking naive.
Re:TLDR (Score:4, Insightful)
Other than for steam sales, Origin sales, Gamersgate, and GoG sales where they see massive spikes in unit turnover. They're willing to let that happen (and, admittedly, with Steam they just sort of do it, and if that means you now get 59 cents per copy of your game sold rather than 3.50 well tough shit for you, and if steam didn't you they were doing this sale, so they ran out of keys and delisted your game, well, tough shit for you, even if you get them new keys in two hours they may not relist your game for weeks, tough shit for you). Publishers are quite agreeable to significant reductions in sales prices generally, as long as they know they can actually sell at that price.
Retail is a whole other problem because you really can't do retail for much less than 30 bucks a copy, you're losing to much to fixed costs and distribution at anything less than that. Unlike movies where publishers are happy to print a million discs for something that will barely sell 50k units, and if it doesn't sell they can repurpose the jewel cases (the expensive part) for another title with a game the box and manual are game specific and you can't afford to eat 40k in inventory that doesn't sell let alone a million units in inventory. Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now? That'd be why.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all. Unfortunately this starts 1 day after release, whereas we wouldn't mind so much if this happened day 21 or preferably day 90. Whether or not people would pay 30 bucks for your game when one was available used for 25, versus 60/55 is hard to say, but it used to be that gamestop was *the* place to have your game, have launch agreements etc. Now it's downright toxic, and you only do business with them because they're still about 25% of gaming retail. If you could could make money without ever giving them a box and only selling through a digital distribution service you will, because gamestop isn't in this to make games, they're in this to fuck you and take your money. Customer or supplier. EA has gone so far as to build their own store because they figure (probably correctly) that in the long run they'll be better off without gamestop, who were ~25 of their total business, and without losing 30% to steam and just distribute through their own store, than to have to deal with both of those hassles.
The PSN and XBL are slightly different animals, because you may have to pay them to push out patches or the like. That makes part of the pricing a matter of guessing just how much money this will cost you if you need to patch it vs how many copies will sell, and for example the Wii U won't give you a cut of sales until you hit 6k copies (which can be tough for an indie dev).
The first major iteration on how to deal with this has been DLC. Which ranges from 5 dollar horse armour to full blown expansions that you download for cash. With DLC the publisher and developer definitely get something, so it can that the only money you make on your game is from a 10 dollar DLC, and the 40-50 dollar release basically just puts the DLC store in the hands of players. Which is a sad way to think about your lovingly crafted game. The next step has been full on online distribution channels (steam, origin, gamersgate, GoG, direct2drive, impulse - now owned by gamestop etc.).
And yes, both the mentioned steam scenario and the thousands of copies in a warehouse happened to companies I worked with recently. Well the thousands of retail copies not that recently, that was 4 or so years ago. Printing all of those copies what a significant chunk of the total development budget (~15%), and they ended up in a warehouse, where, as far as I know they still are.
Publishers aren't stupid. Well, ok, they are. But not entirely as stupid as we portray them to be. They aren't going to commit to lowering prices when they don't know what the licencing fees will be (which by the way, m
Sure it buddy, sure it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Car manufacturer Richard Browne has come out swinging in favor of the rumored remote disable features in the next years model PlayStation Orbis and Xbox Durango.
'The real cost of used cars is the damage that is being wrought on the creativity and variety of cars available to the consumer,' Browne writes. Browne's comments echo those of influential engineer and Raspberry Pi designer David Braben, who wrote last month that '...pre-owned has really killed commuter cars. It's killing daily driver cars in particular, because they will get pre-owned, and it means your day one sales are it, making them super high risk.' Both Browne and Braben conflate hating used car dealers (a thoroughly reasonable life choice) with the supposed evils of the used car market. Braben goes so far as to claim that used cars are actually responsible for high car prices and that 'prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells.' Amazingly, no car manufacturers have stepped forward to publicly pledge themselves to lower car prices in exchange for a cut of used car sales. Car companies are hammering dealers (and recruiting insurance companies to do the same) because it's easier than admitting that the current system is fundamentally broken."
Re:used or bust (Score:4, Insightful)
No, boycotts end. If you choose not to buy products with asbestos because they're poison, you aren't boycotting asbestos. You're choosing not to buy it because it's harmful to you. That happens to provide a market signal to the companies making things with asbestos (or DRM) that they should probably stop including it in their products, but when you're making the purchasing decision, your goal is not to make them stop building products with asbestos. Your goal is to not have asbestos (or DRM) in your house.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, the real problem here, the actually truly factual problem is, 'REPLAY VALUE', most current games just don't fucken have it. Play it once, zip right through it, meh, same old same old, who the fuck want's to play it again, might as well dump it on the second hard market and get some of 'MY MONEY' back.
Want to fix the problem in the second hand market start designing better games again, games that people want to keep and replay again and again and again. Stop the PR=B$ (lies for profit) of spending more on marketing and franchise licences, than on game development, to suck people in on first day game sales buying crappy games.
This has nothing to do with game development and everything to do with the endless stream of bullshit corporate marketing. First day sales is all about marketing strategies and basically sucking people in to buy shit games that they won't ever want to play again. Of course once arsehole game publishers get into that kind of shithead thinking, game replay value becomes an anathema to them as well.
'We don't want them to play the same game over and over again. where's the profit in that, we want them to get sick of it and buy another one', so game re-playability often sucks on purpose as does length of single player games. The benefit of psychopaths in industry, nothing to do with providing customer service and everything is about how best to rip of the customer as much and as quickly as possible (a lot of this thinking was straight out of M$ and the ballmerites).
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't have problems dropping $10-20 on a game. They do have problems with paying $60-70 for a game.
Most people use the term "most people" as shorthand for "me and the people I associate with."
In reality, in the USA, "most people" either have to make a hard choice to buy a $20 game or have no problem at all paying $70.
Re:High Res graphics == Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks to me like the industry has peaked. The genre certainly has, its first person shooter or its not a game. Now the failing business model is being used to warp reality just like the music business. fuck em i say.
Pondering games... (Score:5, Insightful)
The interesting thing is that I suspect that if you adjusted the cost of a 1986 NES game for inflation, you would end up at modern game prices. I don't recall hearing people complain too much about the cost of carts back when I was a kid. People who where 14 and wanted the top 10 games just got a paper route and bought them. I agree that the quality of many triple A titles is very much lacking these days, and I think that is the real problem. I have no problem paying $100 for a video game that provides me with 100+ hours of entertainment, and that is the problem with a lot of games. Price is no guarantee of quality, unfortunately.
I have a theory that the 8 and 16 bit games era was the golden age of video game design, because the hardware resources were so limited. They had to design the hell out of games to make them work and fit in the systems of the time, and I will speculate that they spent a lot more time thinking carefully about core mechanics and fun. I can fire up a compiler nowadays and have my computer rendering 60+fps on a 10k poly count model in about an hour. That doesn't mean that the resulting game will be well designed, though.
The light at the end of the tunnel is that the market will find its level, and wherever we end up there will be games. On the way though, there will be some companies that are eaten by a grue.
Re:Pondering games... (Score:5, Insightful)
In those days, you got the physical cart which in itself was a substantial piece of hardware, plus you usually got a manual with the game too.
Now? Your lucky to get a single DVD and a single sheet which is more likely to be full of legal terms than any instructions for playing the game.
In those days lousy games couldn't hide behind fancy graphics and heavy marketing, the industry was much newer and it was possible to buy magazines which actually contained impartial honest reviews.
You could also quite often return the game if you didn't like it, this was generally allowed with games on media that wasn't easily copied, for instance they would never let you return games on floppies unless they were defective as they would assume you had just taken a copy.
As far as users were concerned, they got a lot more for their money with the carts.
Also you could always resell the carts and buy used games...
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a good point about "first day sales"...
If a game is lousy, but heavily marketed it will sell well initially, but sales will soon taper off when people realise how bad it is...
If a game is good, sales will actually increase as some people buy it, enjoy playing it and tell their friends about it, especially if the game is good enough that those people who bought it don't want to resell it so subsequent players also have to pay full price.
Basically the industry is greedy, they want to do all these customer hostile things while not suffering the consequences that doing so in a free market should entail, and when such things happen its always pirates or used game sales to blame, and never the fact that they're treating their own customers with utter contempt.
Re:Pondering games... (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's the key reasons that people sell used games nowadays. They don't have the replayability of a lot of older games, especially the "shooter on rails" type games. And aside from replay value, the initial play-through of the single-user game is often a matter of 5-20 hours with modern games, whereas 40-60 hours was typical even in the '90s.
If I've bought and played through a game that isn't fun to play again, you can bet your sweet patoot I'm going to sell it off for whatever I can get rather than keep it. I only keep games that are fun and worth playing again.
If I do find myself in possession of a game not worth keeping and that I want to sell off, you can also bet I am not happy with the publisher and that I'm feeling ripped off by them. I'm far less likely to buy any other products from them in the future not because of used game competition, but because they ripped me off.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)