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.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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They must really hate me. I found my PS2 in the neighbour's trash and bought all my games used.
I picked up God of War at a pawn shop last weekend.
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I think just owning a Sony product makes you a terrorist.
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: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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
END COMMUNICATION
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: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.
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I think we can sure as hell stop pushing graphics quality. If you have a hi-res screen and every game looks like Crysis and runs at 60fps, the limiting factor of graphics quality is going to be your eyeballs. We've reached "good enough." Is there that much of a difference between Quake 3 or the original Ghost Recon and today's flashiest game? Compare that to going another 10 years back, the difference is massive.
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: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.
Re:Pondering games... (Score:5, Funny)
People who where 14 and wanted the top 10 games just got a paper route and bought them.
Ah, the good old days. I remember I had to deliver the morning paper for three weeks before I was able to afford Paperboy...
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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: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, Informative)
I also expect that a game I spend a decent amount of money on can be played by me, or my wife, or my kids. You have no idea how pissed off at Ubisoft I was when the DLC for Assassins Creed Brotherhood came out and was tied to the one xbox 360 account which initially downloaded it - my wife's account - and that I couldn't play the DLC without re-purchasing it.
Re:used or bust (Score:4, Informative)
I don't have a problem with paying $60-70 for a game. Have been happy to purchase at that price point for quite a few years. The problem is that brand new games here in Australia come out at $100, often up to $180 for a collectors edition, and that, I do have a problem with paying.
I also expect that a game I spend a decent amount of money on can be played by me, or my wife, or my kids. You have no idea how pissed off at Ubisoft I was when the DLC for Assassins Creed Brotherhood came out and was tied to the one xbox 360 account which initially downloaded it - my wife's account - and that I couldn't play the DLC without re-purchasing it.
According to the license agreement one game purchase is one license so according to Ubisoft in order for your wife or children to play the game you have to buy a separate copy for them. The only defence you have in this is that they can't enforce this license agreement.
But given Ubi's stance on DRM I won't be buying from them again.
BTW PC games are a bit cheaper at only A$70-80 but from the UK they are £30 which is only A$40-50. Guess if I import or buy them locally.
Re:used or bust (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, the real problem here, the actually truly factual problem is, 'REPLAY VALUE', most current games just don't fucken have it. Play it once, zip right through it, meh, same old same old, who the fuck want's to play it again, might as well dump it on the second hard market and get some of 'MY MONEY' back.
Want to fix the problem in the second hand market start designing better games again, games that people want to keep and replay again and again and again. Stop the PR=B$ (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)
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: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.
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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.
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Good luck with that...
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 mayb
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)
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:used or bust (Score:5, Funny)
So... one might say that you were boycotting DRM games.
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: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.
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Meh, same problem as the boycott. You've got a collective action problem. You're assuming you can get a group of people in every city to coordinate this. (And you're assuming that what you're proposing isn't either illegal or grounds for the stores to refuse the returns.)
The solution is much simpler than that. Just don't buy games with DRM. Who cares whether they keep using it or not? There are prolific alternatives with no DRM; pay your money to people who don't treat you like a criminal.
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:used or bust (Score:5, Funny)
I borrow my games from the library. Fuck em all.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:So.... (Score:5, Informative)
*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.
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:So.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Although, I love the in article statement that games would be cheaper had resellers never ventured to sell used games... BAHAHAHAHA.
These guys are just money grubbing assholes, which I equate to the RIAA and MPAA.
Re:So.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you old enough to have grown up with a pre-nine-eleven mindset?
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Re:So.... (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting tidbit: The argument that piracy funds terrorism is based on the idea that terrorists sell counterfeit CDs and DVDs to raise money. The thing is, all of those people have pretty much been put out of business by The Pirate Bay and co., because nobody is going to pay actual money for a pirated DVD when it's free on the internet.
In other words, internet piracy fights terrorism.
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In other words, internet piracy fights terrorism.
Which would be better fight?
Pirates versus Terrorists
or
Pirates versus Ninjas
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So the solution is better internet connectivity, so that people can download their media for free rather than buying it from organised crime gangs.
In places where internet connectivity is affordable and widely available, paying actual money for pirate copies is extremely rare because even the low prices offered by pirates cannot trump free and the convenience of not even having to leave your home.
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How is a broken retail model related to terrorism?
I hear that when you buy a new game, the counter-terrorists win.
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.
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Whoooo MAAAADENNNN!!!!
I love you BRO!
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The trick to preventing single-player game resales is to make good games.
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I would have disagreed with you. But I just bought the 4 expansion packs for Fallout 3, despite having spent nearly 3 months wandering the wastes in the original game. I swore to everyone not to buy any new Fallout related things for me.
I could have gotten the $20 GOTY edition, but it was sold out. Did not exist on the shelf, just sold. So I got two expansion packs for $16, both re-owned, when I could have bought GOTY for $20, and gotten Mothership Alpha (which I really did want), new, and the publisher
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Of course they should do it gratis. Or else, they should accept the fact that people are going to resell the game. The OP had a good suggestion: if they don't want people reselling old games, they have to provide an incentive for the customer to keep it. Obviously, these extra bonuses are going to cost extra money, but you don't get something for nothing. If they want people to keep the games longer, they have to provide more value. If they don't want to do that, then people are going to resell them fa
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.
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If Mr. Browne has ever purchased a used car, borrowed a book, DVD, or CD, then he is a hypocritical schmuck.
To be fair here, the Movie Industry and the Recording Industry BOTH want dib dollars on resells of those product. Car manufacturers get money from parts (even the off-brand ones).
I will however agree on books. Publishers aren't going all crazy-talk about how used book stores are ruining the industry and a reason to sell the first-day hardcovers for double the price they should be.
I still call shenanigans.
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.
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"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 con
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I can't sell my steam games (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is true why isn't MW3 cheaper in Steam?
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Re:I can't sell my steam games (Score:5, Informative)
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Ditto
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What about the past? (Score:2)
Did the industry see a significant increase in income after complicatiog these parts?
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.
BS (Score:3)
The used market has flourished since time immemorial, probably more so in the past than now. It isn't responsible for the lack of creativity in games. Blame the state of the industry, dominated by risk-adverse mega-corporations like EA that take over or muscle out the plucky independent game studios that used to characterize the industry.
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.
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.
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.
Kickstarter (Score:3)
There are people out there willing to pay millions of dollars in aggregate for single player games that don't even exist yet, and pre-owned games are killing the market for single player?
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Just like there were people willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in aggregate for a game that was released to the public in a very rough alpha.
Seriously, any time a spokesperson representing a large game company laments how their industry has been ruined by something other than their own arrogance or lack of desire to innovate or really any reason other than "we want to leverage an existing property that has already been paid for many times over to create a long string of best selling titles that
Stop Whining ... (Score:3)
Bull (Score:3)
The used market softens the ridiculous price of games when they come out. If Joe buys a game for $60, and resells it for $10, , he can use those $10 to buy another game. If reselling used games becomes impossible, then Joe might be short $10 the next time he tries to buy a new game, and will not be able to afford it. He could just wait until it's on sale.
The one place where the game industry loses is because of the friction of the used market: The cut that the intermediaries take. If they want to make that friction go away, why not allow reselling of games, right within their platforms? Why not lower prices to spur sales at full price. I sure have not bought a game for $60 in many years.
And then there's also the model followed by this guy called Gabe Newell. The best ROI his company ever got did not come from extremely expensive games that people can't resell. It came from making a game free to play, and instead of making people pay to get advantages in game, he just got his Australian sidekick to sell digital hats. Since people loved the game, they also bought the hats for Gabe's free game.
But it's easier to blame piracy, or used games, or the Wicked Witch of the West than it is to build a very solid product first and figure out how to get paid later.
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.
before gamestop the pawn stores resold games (Score:2)
before gamestop the pawn stores resold games some times at high prices as well.
A non-issue (Score:2)
I have no problem with this, as long as they make it clear what they're doing. If you don't like the idea, don't buy them. If nobody buys such game, they won't be sold any more.
Dude is right. Video games are a competitive marketplace. If more people bought the games new (because less people bought used), there'd be more games published, there'd be more pressure to lower game prices, etc. Games aren't made as charity or on a government quota, they're made with the hope of financial returns.
All the "I am
If anything. (Score:2)
This means that it's about time for another video game industry crash.
customers were treated about as bad now as they were before the last one. it took the crash at least for a short while to treat their customer base well. i think they need to relearn that lesson.
I never buy games when they first come out (Score:4, Insightful)
Change their pricing model (Score:3)
Compare these two hypothetical situations
Even their cohorts in Hollywood allow movie theaters to have a second run of movies after they are getting stale with lower ticket prices. The used to be $1 theaters, but now they're probably closer to $3. Basically, in the world of media and media related products. The older something is, the less you can get from it. These really are depreciating assets. If you don't want GameStop to profit by selling a used copy of your game for $5 less than new price, cut the damn new price. Used game prices are a much better reflection of the true market value of these games. The publishers have unrealistic ideas of their games market values.
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."
Indie games FTW! (Score:3)
Get 'em right here [humblebundle.com].
Oh yeah, there's music there too. Have I said enough to get Slashdot shut down for linking, and armed men in black uniforms sent to my house to terrorize me? No? Well, how about a few more links:
Re: (Score:2)
That's called Steam, isn't it? I don't remember the last time I paid more than $5 for a game there.
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They're lower than ever!
I'm confused. How does "lower than ever" equate to "not high"? If a single game cost $1,000 in 1990, and then they dropped down to $500 over the years, would that mean they're not expensive simply because they're lower in price than they ever were?
I know one thing: they're too expensive for me to waste my money on them. Especially when these game developers and companies are treating me, the customer, like absolute shit. DRM, locked down consoles, attacks on used game sales... no thanks.
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Looks to me like Core Games [coregames.com] is doing OK.
Seriously though, what is a "core game"? Is it short for "hardcore"? Then what's that? Is it a hard game? Is it a complex game? Is it a flashy blockbuster game?
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The games industry is MUCH more fragile than the car, music or movies industry, before some smartass comes in with his "used cars never killed the industry", perhaps you should also look again at the MASSIVE bailout of a car company that happened in the not too distant past.
Used cars didn't kill GM, poor management did.
How many people do you think would put up $20-30,000 to buy a car if there was no used market?
Re: (Score:3)
Here in the real world
What is the "real world"? Would it suddenly become a fake world if nothing was done?
I don't know what you're talking about, but doing nothing is very much an option.
The stores are the problem
They're simply selling used games. I have no intention of ever agreeing with you if you're saying they should be punished for that. Even if the entire game industry goes under (it won't), I have no intention of restricting the right to resell games.
instead of the gaming industry
You mean instead of the people that have a problem with well-established rights? Reminds me of the
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The thing is that these games retail for a huge price, usually $60 now for PC. That's too much. But the price does not go down very fast except in brick-and-mortar stores where there is incentive to push old product off the shelves. Online prices do not go down as fast and publishers can maintain their inflated idea of a game's worth. Print, stamp, wrap, ship and stock a boxed PC game and there's a lot of overhead, so then why are online games selling for exactly the same price as a store bought game?
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: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.
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
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Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now?
Good, less paper to take up space. You can also advertise this as "saving the trees". A digital manual does not take up much space, it usually fits on the same disc as the game - great. If only hardware manufacturers did that ... though I think they do, other than a quick setup guide (which you may need to read before the computer is operational enough to read a pdf) the rest of the manual is on the driver disc. TV/audio equipment still comes with full manuals - instead the manuals should be on a CD, so they take up less space and can be found more easily (I would copy all of them to one CD or just keep on a hard drive - that way I could find the manual quickly and not need to keep it near the device).
I haven't seen game in boxes locally too, just the disc in a DVD case, pretty much like movies. I have no problem with that - less paper to take up space or throw out.
Yes, and it's not like people read manuals anyway. Though you're wrong on the advertising. No one, not customers, not distributors care, in the slightest. But the removal of manuals was precipitated by costs (having to print and ship manual costs a lot of money for what is today no value). But collectors editions still have manuals or art books or the like because those customers want them.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all.
I bought used monitors, tape decks, servers, UPSs and other equipment because of the price (and some devices are not made anymore). The manufacturers are for the most part still in business. If your games is so short that it can be finished quickly and has no replay value or is just bad, then of course people will want to sell it. I can return broken equipment (or even if it works as intended, but for some reason I do not like it, as long as I decide than in 14 days) for a full refund. Can I return a game? Oh, right, I can't. If your game is good then people will play it instead of reselling it immediately.
Maybe this is why used games are so popular - no returns. When I buy a used device, I cannot return it, even the warranty given is a few days, useful only if the device stops working when I bring it home. When I buy a new device, I get 1-5 year warranty and the ability to return it for any reason in 14 days. Games are sold without warranty (and without even the promise that it will work, even if the game disc was blank, I couldn't do anything) and no way to return them (and most games are bad), so the "new" has no advantage over "used". Of course, I could pirate the game, see if it is any good then buy it, but by pirating it I make the developer lose at least a billion dollars, so me buying the game afterward will still result in almost $1G loss.
I buy games on steam for up to 10EUR. Anything more expensive and I just wait for the price to drop or a Christmas sale or whatever. If the game is bad, well, I lost 10EUR, a bit much, but survivable. OTOH, if I want to buy some device that is more expensive, I study it really carefully - read reviews, get the user manual to find out if it has all the features I assume it does (I once bought a VCR that cannot output the tape trough the RF port, while it wasn't a deal breaker, it is an annoyance) and sometimes may even download the service manual to see if something is as I assume it to be (and nothing is written in the user manual) - older devices are easier, since the schematic is easier to trace to find out. This may take me a few days to choose between various options or to see if a particular device is useful to me.
Yes, exactly, but when you buy for 10 euro 7 euro goes to the publisher, which means 3.5 goes to me. (hence my 3.
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While you're at it you can pledge to buy your clothes at thrift stores and eat out of dumpsters.
I *DO* buy many of my everyday clothes (obviously not underwear or other such personal clothing items, or "dress" clothes like suits/ties) at thrift/second-hand stores, and I take what would go in that dumpster (my organic garbage) and compost it and use it to grow food.
As an extra, I also collect spent brass casings and shells and reload them for my firearms. I don't hear ammo makers whining over "lost sales". They make money selling reloading supplies & equipment. Maybe the game companies should take