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."
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Interesting)
Braben (Score:4, Interesting)
He produced the Frontier games, didn't he? My experience of those was:
Frontier: copy protection so bad that you had about a 25% chance of being able to start the game until you removed it.
First Encouters: required a patch to run at all, then crashed. I think I played about an hour before I gave up.
So I doubt he has to worry about anyone wanting to buy a used copy of either.
Re:So.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you old enough to have grown up with a pre-nine-eleven mindset?
Re:So.... (Score:3, Interesting)
High Res graphics == Expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason to upgrade the hardward generally comes down to improving graphics and processing power. The added work for things like high end physics and AI is not an especially big hit in terms of development expense though. What is driving the cost upward is primarily the high res 3d graphics.
Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen. If you increase the polygon count of your scene from 100 000 to 10 000 000, the labour requirements get difficult. Just watch the credits from a game made in 2001 and compare to a game made in 2012. The size of the art teams have gotten proportionally much larger compared to the size increase for the programmers.
Also, the assumption that the CEO's are getting hookers and blow is not universally true. If you produced one of the top 3 games of the year, sure, people are getting rich. If your outside the top 10 though, the development costs are eating enough of the profit that its a crap shoot on whether or not your broke even.
Used games and piracy have eaten a great deal of the profit margin for games that were good but not great. Lowering the price might actually be a good idea, but if your barely breaking even your going to have a hard time justifying the move to share holders who are seeing only marginal profitability.
In any case, change is coming because the iPhone / iPad is forcing it. All the companies that cannot compete at the $60 a game core market are starting to chase the lower dev costs for the mobile devices, and the bigger companies that see 'easy money' are following them. In any case, the long term move is to cut the retail outlets out of the game distribution entirely. Once that happens, your pretty much F*cked for buying used games anyway.
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Re:yes, Braben (Score:4, Interesting)
Sarcasm aside, I'm sure that the auto industry would do that if they had the power.
Surely they're not that stupid. The whole reason cars sell as well as they do is because people are able to "trade up" to a newer model every few years, and the reason they're able to do that affordably is because they're able to resell their 3+ year old vehicle on the used market for a significant fraction of its new price. If they couldn't do that, they'd buy cheaper cars, and they'd keep them for much longer. Middle class people aren't going to buy a $50k luxury car if they're stuck with it for 25 years or have to junk it when they get tired of it; they don't usually have that much money available anyway, and are able to afford it because they've traded in their previous car for for $10-20k (plus the financing).
Unfortunately for the content industry, modern technology basically gives an analogue to Star Trek replicators. Any media can be copied for no cost except for the bandwidth and electricity needed.
Actually, it's even worse than replicators. It's probably safe to assume that the amount of energy needed for replicators would be quite high (and much higher if they transmuted elements, but still a lot just to rearrange molecules). The amount of energy needed for copying digital media is puny, and constantly shrinking. You could rig a generator to an exercise bike and power today's low-power computers. I imagine the exertion needed to power a smartphone would be quite small, and those can store tens of gigabytes of media now.
But yes, basically the media companies now exist in a post-scarcity market, and are trying to act like they're still in a market where scarcity exists. It's not going to turn out well for them.
Stopped buying new games in 2005. (Score:3, Interesting)
Avid Old School Bioware fan here. I have BG1, BG2, KOTOR, NWN(all expansions).
I stopped buying when they started with DLC to devalue used products, or try to force you to buy early, or get locked out of DLC. No coincidence this was after EA purchased Bioware.
I perceive this as attacking the customer. If you attack me, you are never getting another dime from me again.
I haven't purchased DLC/DRMd/Server locked game, and I never will.
I haven't bought a new game since 2005. I expect I won't again, except maybe $1 to $5 apps, since I consider that a free price for a rental.
But I will never pay $50-$60 to a locked down game. If the keys to play are elsewhere, that is a rental, that could be revoked at corporate whim.
Re:High Res graphics == Expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
As a 3d artist in both games and high end, I can attest to what you just posted.
Deadlines? Shorter. Workload? Higher. Hours? 80-100 weeks for the past 10 years. Overtime? Ha! Benefits? Nope. Software? Autodesk puts out worse and worse releases every year, making things take *longer*, but our deadlines just get shorter.
It's a mess, it's not sustainable, and soon it'll implode.
But from my experience it's not the majority of users that demand the super high end 3d graphics, it's the marketing team. It's like all they understand is superficial glitz.
Re:used or bust (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do that?
Not buying a DRM'ed game doesn't tell the developer or studio anything.
Buying a DRM'ed game, having the store gift wrap it, and then bringing it back (in pristine condition including the shrink wrap) the next week for a refund "due to not wanting DRM'ed games", is going to rack up issues for the retailer.
If enough people do that, to the extent that a retailer thinks they've cleared their inventory of a particular game on or just after release day, only to get 50% of them back a week later, will make the retailers push back against the developers/studios.
Hell, if you can organize it properly, it wouldn't take that big of a group to get the store to constantly have fairly large amount of money tied up in potential refunds.
Suppose a store gets 100 units of game. At a retail price of 60 dollars, that's 6,000 dollars worth of inventory. If we say the mark-up is 50% (it isn't), that means they've paid 3,000 dollars for it. Not a huge amount, but it's still a dent.
You and your group of accomplices get together and buy 50 of them. That's 3,000 dollars, 1,500 of which goes to the store, 1,500 of which goes to the game studio.
The store is now up 1,500 dollars.
A week later those 50 games are all returned in exchange for 3,000 dollars of in-store credit.
Those 3,000 dollars are now spent buying 50 other games. 1,500 dollars of which goes to the store, 1,500 dollars goes to the game studio.
Those 1,500 dollars the store earned are now going to the game studio.
A week later, the same thing. Now the store is missing 1,500 dollars.
Week five they're missing 3,000 dollars.
Week six - 4,500 dollars.
Week seven - 6,000 dollars, but they get their first refund from the game studio, so they're back to only missing 4,500 dollars.
That would pretty much cover the monthly salary for two sales clerks.
Keep it up for a year, and that constant outlay on products is going to tear a hole in the store's pocket.
Once the store manager notices that their DRM'ed games have a massive return rate and outlay like that, they won't be inclined to buying that many of them. If they're corporate, it'll be pushed up the chain across many many stores.
There are currently 275 cities in the US with more than 100,000 inhabitants. If each city can mange to get a group of 50 to participate in this, that's a constant 412,500 dollars outlay for the stores in those cities, assuming an insane mark-up of 50%.
If it's a slightly more realistic 25% it's 618,750 dollars. At 10% it's 742,500 dollars, not to mention the useless stock the stores ends up with.
And all it takes to participate in this fun task is something like twenty minutes a week, a one time fee of 60 dollars and some people you like hanging out with.
Re:Ever bought a used car? (Score:3, Interesting)
"And yes, I know that publishers claim that they license a right to use software instead of selling that right."
There was a recent court ruling that the First Sale Doctrine applies to software as well.
And the courts in general have long held that if you walk into a retail outlet and plunk down your money, you have BOUGHT the product, not licensed it, regardless of any written restrictions that are on or in the product.
A lot of people are not aware of this, but restrictions on the after-purchase use of products has been tried for just about everything under the sun, including hammers and shovels. Courts have consistently held that the manufacturer or supplier has no right to restrict the use of a product after it is purchased. Zero. Even if it is on the front of the package in bold print.