'Used' A Dirty Word in Gaming

Gamers with Jobs has a piece looking at the increasingly negative reaction the game industry has towards used games. From the article: "The problem is that the used game market has not only redefined the direction of the specialty retailer, but it has attracted the attention of the big box stores, and the success of limited test markets might eventually reshape the landscape of the gaming retail industry as a whole, edging publishers and developers out of a significant cut of the action. This as next-generation systems send development costs skyrocketing put developers in the position spending more than ever just as the biggest retailers are considering keeping more of the profits for themselves."

Comments

Re:Just like CD sales...

[drinkypoo]

There's nothing about this idea that inherently prevents you from burning a backup. Granted, specific implementations may do that - and you may choose to avoid purchasing software from people who use implementations like that.

Re:Dev cost skyrocketing?

[__aaitqo8496]

Take Madden 2004, slap on it new textures, make some minor gameplay changes, call it Madden 2005 and release it.

I may be speaking slightly out of place here, but I have a good friend that not only worked foe EA Tiburon, but actually worked on the UI for both madden 2005 and madden 2006.

let me assure you several things:

1. it's not just as easy as "slapping on prettier textures". yes the code is very old (and crappy), but there's tons of work that has to be done (largely fixing bugs)
2. they work the ever-loving **** out of thier employees, and thier employees are appropriately compensated. multiply this for the number of people workong on a team, multiple teams, the testers, managers, supervisors, etc.
3. new (albeit small) features are added every year, which require lots of testing, fixing, adjusting, etc. i remember that the kick menu on madden 2005 wars replaced VERY late in development and shipped buggy
4. part of the problem is the management mentality at EA. desite a "mature" codebase, the number of bugs that has to be found and fixed each year is increased. how the hell does this make any sense? in effect, testers has to "find" bugs that may not really exist and developers have to "fix" those bugs. basically, bureaucracy is dragging the team down, causing extra work

i'm sure the above is overly simplified, but it gives you a little bit of information on how things REALLY work

Re:Used games are all I can afford

[abradsn]

I've actually had experience working as a programmer on a video game too. We didn't get paid more depending on the retail success of the game.

So, I'm not coming from a place of misunderstanding. Besideds that, the person owning/working the store has overhead to take care of, and their time is worth something too.

We also want to make money, just like the development houses. It's a mutual agreement. Besides, the do get the biggest chunk of the money.

There is more to a product than just the creativity that goes into it. It's too much to go into...but suffice it to mention the business orientated aspects such as accounting, and marketing. These cost money. Game production houses sometimes hand off these massive responsibilities to other businesses. They do this because it is cost effective to do so.