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The Business of Videogame Reprints
An anonymous reader writes "Recently certain 'rare' videogames like Rez, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Gitaroo-Man have circulated in the market starting at internet retailer Game Quest Direct. How did a seemingly unknown retailer end up getting these games? By acting as a financing publisher. Is this a possible future for other online retailers?"
I was robbed. There are other ways of getting your collection wiped out, or even just a bit of your collection getting damaged. I'm glad they're reprinting Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, as it means it'll be easier for me to buy it again to replace the copy that got stolen.
People who are in the market for "rare" things are more often a bit smarter than the average sheep. If they see a used copy of Rez, they won't think anything of it. If they see a new copy of Rez at their local Gamestop, they might think "hey there's a source of these somewhere". They would then discover this site. And Gamestop would lose a sale. This is basically Gamestop trying to maximize its profits.
I'm going to copy and paste my response over from CAG, where users have talked directly with GQD employees in the forums, and has caused a lot of debate/discussion regarding their practices:
I just want to make one quick comment, as I know this is going to be a hot topic of the thread.
I don't quite understand the idea of pride getting in the way, because chances are these rare games are going to remain at least somewhat under-the-table, so to speak. If I were to go find typical gamers at a college or something, chances are high you won't find a lot of people talking about Disgaea, Rez, or anything along those lines. They still remain obscure. I can't imagine tracking someone down who knows what Culdcept is, and I've never met anyone who has played Gitaroo Man. I honestly think our interactions with each other directly in the CAG community skews our idea of the gaming public. In other words, you're still going to be "in the know" and somewhat exclusive. None of my friends know shit about half the games I have in my collection. Dood, want to play Daigasso Band Brothers? "Wtf." And so on.
I mean, my god, we still have people who don't know Link's name is LINK, and not ZELDA. Hell, Samus is still incognito for the most part. You think people know who Ramza is? Or Laharl?
What does the gaming public buy the most? Madden, GTA, Halo, Mario Party, etc. Outside of that, the gaming population composed of people importing Electroplankton and Ouende is still relatively small. Just like people collecting various obscure Criterion DVDs when Spiderman 2 is going to outsell them all by a factor of 100.
I think owning a super rare game is cool, especially when you show it someone and they really enjoy it. There's a certain satisfaction in that. But I'd much rather them be able to purchase it later on when a reprint appears. It bolsters the community and gaming industry altogether, and I think it paves the way for sequels to get made, especially for games that didn't sell well.
In fact, it's fairly close to Family Guy getting picked up again. Think about it like that. I'm not the biggest FG fan but I realize a lot of people enjoy it, and prior to Adult Swim picking it up, it wasn't obscure so to speak, but it was definitely below the public eye moreso than, say, Friends or Seinfield.
If you've got a copy of PDS (Panzer Dragoon Saga), your collection kick ass. And if you own one and it gets reprinted, your collection still kicks ass because it was original. It doesn't lose value all of a sudden. Why would monetary value matter in the first place, unless you were going to sell them at some point anyway? Which won't happen because you are a collector to begin with, so why does it matter? That's what I never understood.
Anyway, not trying to start a flame ware. Maybe a small change could be made to reprints so collectors would be happy. At least then GQD meets them halfway.
Also, and this is just me talking, but the thought of certain reprints gets me wet. Yes, you heard me. Here's hoping that includes Japanese only games. I'm looking at YOU, Radiant Silvergun.
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
This is still really good news for the people who shop on Ebay for copies of these more rare games. I know when I was shopping for a copy of Gitaroo man it was always going for around $70. The prices have dropped now I'm guessing that this is one of the reasons.
In the end this should be really good for the cult games. There are a lot of games that don't make it as a hit out the gate because they are under advertised but later gain fans from word of mouth. Doing this type of thing will help those titles out greatly. This could help good games made by small companies that can't afford big advertising budgets get some recognition.
I have to agree with this totally. The games are there to play, not collect. It's highly annoying to have to look at paying ~US$80-100 for a game that is only regarded as excellent because it's hard to find.
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What drives me nuts is these idiots that are all about Rhapsody and Rez etc, until they are suddenly reprinted and cheap and then they don't want to know about them.
Personally, I'm highly excited that copies of older PS1 games that are normally stupidly expensive may become much cheaper and easier to find. GQDs prices are still pretty high, but once the games circulate for a while they should drop in price to a more affordable level. I really want to get into some of these harder to find games, and I'd much rather be playing originals, even if they are reprints, as opposed to torrented isos.
For much comedy read this thread : http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showthread.ph
Best quote from it
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Originally Posted by Camwi
[Can someone please explain the whole "Rhapsody ordeal" that I've heard mentioned on here before? It seems to have pissed a lot of people off..]
everyone wanted it because it's rare, then it un-rared, now they are stuck with a game about singing fairies made for 12 year old girls.
Just because it is "rare" doesn't mean it is worth finding, ESPECIALLY if you are a gamer. I guess that's my point. I'd rather track down a copy of PDS to play it, not own it.
In that case, PDS is, like all Saturn games, extremely easy to obtain, and for nothing. What are you worried about by buying an original copy, Sega getting their cut of the profits? They're not getting anything from a used sale on Ebay at this point. If all you want to do is *play* the game, just find some ISO's somewhere... right? There's no moral reason not to (unless Sega does issue a re-release for this decade-old Saturn game).
Presumably you go out and try to find an original copy used for some materialistic reason. You want to own an original PDS. You don't just want to play it, or you'd have just downloaded it from somewhere and called it done.
The point being, almost everybody is a collector to some extent. The only thing that differs is degree.
Anyway, what you are talking about and what real hardcore collectors of "rare" games do are two different things. That's why I said "collecting" for the PS2 is pretty pointless right now - if you are collecting for the sake of rarity, then you don't even know what you want at this point. If you are collecting because you want to play the game, then you're not really collecting, and you shouldn't care at all about these reprints "lowering the value" of your original run. And if you do care, then you shouldn't have bought the game based on its value to begin with... because it's not that rare! See what I'm saying? You can't win if you buy a game like Rez based on how rare and valuable it supposedly is while the system is still current.
I'm agreeing with you in one sense, but my original point was disputing the article's assertion that these reprints "lowered the value" of the original print run. There is no inherent value to lower, and if there was, a reprint wouldn't lower it. If the value of a game drops because of a reprint, then there wasn't any real value there to begin with and the prices being paid previously were simply inflated. Collectors don't buy reprints, and the only thing that can lower the price of an original print is the collector market drying up. Obviously, if people stop buying originals in favor of reprints, then there was no collector market to begin with.
People who collect games for the sake of value or rarity (and there's nothing about doing this that's any more wrong than collecting rare hat pins or rare refrigerator magnets or rare paintings or whatever else you're into - it's a hobby in itself) do so decades after the fact. We're still basically in the Atari 2600 era of collecting right now, and just starting to scratch the surface of the Famicom/NES and the 16 bit systems. That's about how long it takes for the collector community to really get organized and start doing things like creating rarity lists and keeping each other updated as far as how often various games come up. If you're collecting stuff for current systems thinking that value's gonna hold, you're in for a world of hurt in a few years no matter what happens.
My list is not up to date (it's current as of December 2003) but here are some *really* rare PS2 games, along with their cumulative sales numbers to date (don't ask me how or where I got this, but these are NPD numbers - not just weekly, but all time up to that point):
I-NINJA 4,850
XGRA:EXTREME G RACING 4,771
SPACE CHANNEL 5 SE 4,720
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA 4,691
LOONEY TUNES:BACK IN 4,638
BOMBASTIC 4,323
ROGUE OPS 3,627
VIRTUAL-ON MARZ 3,280
MONSTER 4X4: MASTERS 3,145
FUGITIVE HUNTER: WAR 3,135
SMASH CARS 3,006
METAL ARMS: GLITCH 2,899
GLADIATOR: SWORD 2,632
GOBLIN COMMANDER 2,452
WHIPLASH 2,427
KYA: DARK LINEAGE 1,765
BUTT UGLY MARTNS:ZOOM 1,267
MUPPETS PARTY CRUISE 867
A couple of those games (like Space Channel 5 an
It's mostly that it's an extremly good game, and presumably had a limited run in the US. The combination of good vibes from hardcore gamers + limited number on the shelf = expensive on eBay.
I'm not a reviewer, but I think the thing about Rez is the experience. Gameplay wise it's a stripped down rail shooter (Panzer Dragoon / Starfox etc.), which on it's own would be rather plain, but it's just the intergration of the music into the gameplay, the stylized graphics, merging into a really good experience as a whole. It's definatley one of my favourite games ever.
The Trance Vibrator was only released in Japan, like most of these weird accessories. The game does make good use of the rumble pack though.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
Ok, point taken on imports, but the point I was trying to make is that there are tons of games people won't get at all. You could replace Ouende and Daigasso with any number of USA releases, including but not limited to: Katamari Damacy, Culdcept, Chibi-Robo, Odama, Disgaea, Makai Kingdom, Persona, Rhapsody, Intelligent Cube, etc etc. Essentially any rare/sought-after game that is below the radar. I'd venture to say even some more mainstream games fall into this category - Beyond Good and Evil, Viewtiful Joe (though there is a cartoon now), Phoenix Wright. Using imports was a bad way to drive the point home, I should have used local releases. Essentially it's an X variable and there's dozens of candidates.
As for SSBM, I dunno, I still occassionally hear people saying "I want to be the guy with the sword." And when I say Link, sometimes hear "NO, the GUY WITH THE SWORD." Of course, hardly anyone knows where Shiek came from. And don't even try to explain Marth and Roy, let alone some of the other characters. I'd venture a good percentage don't know where Gannondorf comes from. Hardly anyone knows Ness.
Yea, SSBM isn't rare. At all. (Unless you want to argue Player's Choice versions versus original, but that's not the point here.) But that doesn't mean all the people who played it know all the characters. I can't imagine what will happen if some really obscure characters appear in the Rev version, including possibly Pit, Little Mac, etc. Wario had better be in there, thankfully he's known enough.
The whole point with SSB is to have "all star" Nintendo characters fight (hence why a number of decisions were made during development, including removing the ability to play as Master Hand, unless you hack the game with a device). But there are many people (moreso in places outside Japan, I'd suspect) who don't have a clue.
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.