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Vital Parts of Games As DLC?
Epic Games president Michael Capps did an interview recently with GamesIndustry, and he had some interesting things to say about the future of downloadable content, and how it will affect the retail games market. He also discussed the trend toward social gaming, and Epic's plans in that regard. Quoting:
"I'm not sure how big it is here [in Europe], but the secondary market is a huge issue in the United States. Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales, and so you're starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by ... if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code. I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free.' We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used — way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it."
Do they seriously think their customer base will stand for behavior like that? Anyone who has ever bought a used game will cease to buy any games, new or used, by companies that try to pull this shit. Consumers don't like being raked over the coals.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
They were a once great PC game company. I blame the culture of console gaming for their current attitudes.
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Not only that, money-grubbing whores who have said they're turning their backs on the very fans that propelled them to success (PC gamers). Fuck those guys.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
... a large printing company has started replacing the last page in it's books with a 900 number readers must call to find out the ending. Apparently the greedy buzzards weren't making any money when people checked books out at the library.
Ok, they want to kill of rental and used games. Fine. Doesn't matter to me.... but the value of games as a bought item like a DVD or book is a lot higher to me than a non-tranferrable license. Price accordingly and I'll bite. Oh! You idiots thought we are going to keep paying $60 and not be able to loan it out to a friend or turn it at Game Stop? That's very different, that is just a big old price increase heading into a recession. Brilliant move guys!
Democrat delenda est
Doctrine of first sale still applies to other properties that can be purchased and re-sold, despite the fact that authors make no money off sales of used books, nor Ford off sales of used cars and trucks.
Its like the music industries attitude problem has somehow infiltrated the thinking of other digital organizations worldwide.
Harry Potter will have had way more readers than it had sales (probably more than twice as many) before accounting for privacy at all.
"Get over it" comes to mind.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
What game publishers don't understand: All those people that trade in games at Gamestop? Do you know what they use the store credit for? *New Games* If you kill the secondary market, all you will do is take money from the primary market, with the result of a poorer games industry. Is that what you want?
Won't work. I still play starcraft and broodwar. I'm definitely not interested in paying more to play it. For your scheme to work, the subscription price needs to be small enough to entice me to continue to pay. At that level, the publishers aren't interested. What they are interested is the $15 or whatever people continue to pay for World of Warcraft. What they don't understand is that there's only *one* microsoft, *one* world of warcraft.
"We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used".
Welcome to the real world! Want to be rich? Keep working!
"I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free.'"
Surely they mean they've talked to marketing/admin at a games development company? Which in-the-trenches developer, likely a gamer themselves, would want their games to play out like that?
Make a good game. Sell it. If the replay value is high enough, people will keep it rather than selling or renting it. Same if you provide legitimate, on-going DLC (whether free or paid). Engineer some stupid scenario whereby you drag more money out of people for the hell of it and you'll miss sales.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
No, god no. I don't frankly care if it reduces my costs overall. I'm fed up with this contract culture, where anything worth doing requires agreeing to terms that frankly, nobody understands. I want to have some control -- not to be bound to a million different obnoxious companies. Look at all the nightmares when people try to unsubscribe to AOL, for example. Now multiply it a hundredfold.
Behold the future of gaming: using DLC as a form of DRM.
Perhaps if enough people aren't willing to purchase your game at full retail, your retail price is too high for the product you are selling?
There's a reason GameStop, etc are basically pawn shops these days - they figured out that there's a whole lot more people willing to buy the games at roughly 30% off retail.
But no, your answer is to try and kill secondary sales.
I honestly hope you do, in some ways, as then you'll see that your logic is equally as flawed as the RIAA's and that each "secondary sale" or rental isn't someone who would have purchased it at full retail otherwise.
Let's see, why would I sell a game... Hmm... Would I sell Civilisation II? Nah, I might want to play it again. Would I sell Alpha Centauri? Are you nuts, that game can still be a blast (provided you find a machine able to run it)! I also couldn't see myself selling my copy of Supreme Commander.
If you don't want your players to buy their games used, give your gamers a reason NOT TO SELL THEM. Simple as that. You can only buy used what others offer you. Replay value is what you're looking for. Of course, if you offer games that can be done in less than 10 hours and give the player zero incentive to play it again (EA, I'm looking your way!), the temptation to dump the game back onto the market before it loses too much value is quite high. Hey, if I buy it offshore and get it past customs, I might even sell it without a loss!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's been A LOT of negative stuff with regards to games--mostly on the PC site. DRM, DLC that's promised and never delivered, poor quality. You know something else? None of these seems to have any real effect on sales.
Spore still sold millions of copies. Mass Effect sold well. As much as people SAID "Oh, I'm not buying this DRM crap" or "I hate these buggy games", they are still selling by the millions. Could these titles have sold BETTER if they didn't have all these negative points? Maybe, maybe not.
As soon as you have a major title that comes out, that will have some code like this...people will still buy it. And if publishers can put these kind of restrictions on games, why shouldn't they do it? There's no downside.
As far as piracy, or even renting goes(and when did THAT become evil)..it's limited to people that never really planned on buying it anyways. Those aren't lost sales despite what their studies say. The vast majority of people still still just go to a store and buy it. Good games still sell well. A cry of "OMG PIRACY KILLED OUR SALES" from a publisher is just trying to defend a bad title. Maybe Crysis would have sold better if it actually ran on more than 10% of the PCs sold at the time.
Expect these things to continue. Also expect them to be tolerated by the gaming public. All that crying about SecuROM is going to go away when Mirror's Edge comes out and you HAVE to play it. Having to have some code to get the last level of a game will be cried about on every forum--until Bioshock 2 has one. And it will sell millions of copies.
What can anyone do about it? Nothing. What COULD everyone do? Ignore the game. Don't pirate it. Don't purchase it. Don't talk about it on forums. But that won't happen. Most will happily take whatever the game publisher does to them just so they can have that shiny new version of their favorite game.
Actually a car manufacturer makes extra money before the second hand car is sold. The first owner pays a price that includes an extra portion for how much that owner can make back by reselling the car in a few years. Take away used sales, and new sale prices drop. Same for the game manufacturer. So what this pig is complaining about is he only gets to make his money a few months faster on average, than the guy he sold it to gets to make some back. Now you know why American style capitalism doesn't work, whether the theoretical libertarian version would or not - Our 'visionary, self-made captains of industry' are actually 'whining, embittered, envious little losers'.
Who is John Cabal?
"BAWWW we want more money for the same product BAWWW you can't transfer that license even if you no longer retain the software BAWWW let's rob value from our products while making it so after purchasing all the DLC the full game costs more than standard shelf price, that'll show those dirty consumers!"
Let's get this out in the open right here, folks:
I WILL NOT PAY FOR A DEMO.
When will these faggots learn that their products aren't really worth that much, are presently -overvalued- in spite of rising development costs, and that there's a big difference between Oblivion horse armor and a crucial part of the game? This DLC garbage is going too far. I'll pay for an expansion pack that adds to an -already complete game-, I'll pay for little trinkets and other additions if they're worth it, but I will not purchase an incomplete game and then pay extra for the ending. That's like paying extra for the last five chapters of a book or the last half hour of a movie, it doesn't fucking work like that.
Cocksuckers that come up with ideas like this are pathetic businessmen grasping for straws. What developers and publishers are doing when they consider selling whole games as piecemeal is subtracting value from each portion and expecting the consumer to pay more for the whole. A good businessperson adds value to a product before asking the customer to ante up instead of taking it away.
I'm glad these guys aren't in the business of selling books, imagine how ape shit they would go if they learned about these places called libraries, that buy the book once, then lend it out free to whoever wants to read it? Hundreds, even thousands of people getting enjoyment from 1 sale, we better make laws against it fast, or book publishing will be doomed for sure!
Despite all their commercial success, Epic (especially cliffyb) seems determined to find excuses why their games aren't the highest selling entertainment product of all time. The PC version of Gears of War stunk, it had framerate and screen tearing issues, lots of bugs, and little to no effort put into adapting it to PC controls. When the sales stunk, they blamed piracy on the PC. Im sure when GoW 2 comes out, and doesn't outsell Halo, GTA , and Madden combined in the first week, he will blame modchips or paid off/bribed reviewers from Sony or whatever other thing he can come up with to massage his own ego. They owe a lot of their success to Id, who basically created the mold for their early games, but if you listen to them talk you'd think they are god's gift to gamers, bringing them ideas so innovative only truly inspired artists could come up with them, like a first person shooter where you fight aliens with guns, and chainsaws, and chain-saw guns.
... reporter Mike Jones at ACME Construction headquarters where they have just filed an injunction against the National Association of Realtors, ordering them to sell only new homes. John Tightwad, company spokesman had this to say, "The secondary market is a destructive, criminally un-American, invention of the realtors with the sole purpose of eliminating hardworking construction jobs! Every time someone in America buys a used home, they're stealing someone's livelihood!"
Welcome to copyright law being way behind where technology is.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
First everyone is complaining how evil the music labels are because they can't adapt to modern world of freely distributable data.
Then some company DOES adapt to it and everyone here has a fit!
Take a look at the sales charts. Here's 2007:
World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment) - 2.25 million
World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment) - 914,000
The Sims 2 Seasons Expansion Pack (EA Maxis) - 433,000
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward) 383,000
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (EA Los Angeles) - 343,000
Sim City 4 Deluxe (Maxis) - 284,000
The Sims 2 (Maxis) - 281,000
The Sims 2 Bon Voyage Expansion Pack (Maxis) - 271,000
Age of Empires III (Ensemble Studios) - 259,000
The Sims 2 Pets Expansion Pack (Maxis) - 236,000
Let's see. Either we can be WoW and monetize through recurring billing, which we get 96 cents out of every dollar (as opposed to 25 cents from selling boxes). Or we could crank out casual-friendly $20 expansion packs to sell at WalMart for development budgets in the 6 figures.
Or we could try selling boxes of AAA games. The vast majority of these will fail to hit the megasuccess they need to to recoup our investments as game budgets are getting close to the 9 figures mark. Meanwhile our audience is being corrupted by the expectations set by games like WoW or consoles who can afford budgets of Ungodly Amounts Of Money because their monetization strategy can easily recoup them.
The renters, pirates, and used-game buyers will complain that we charge too much if we sell AAA games, though... On second thought... screw 'em. We sell data, not boxes, and we will control the data.
Slashdot will be pissed off. Screw 'em. They don't pay us anyhow.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
In holland there is a 2nd hand bookstore chain "De Sleghte" which has stores in all the major towns. Does the book industry complain about them not making any money from there sales? Well, they might, but nobody cares. 2nd hand books are normal.
Pawn brokers make a living selling 2nd hand goods, any decent sized town in holland got some kind of 2nd hand store for household goods.
What student doesn't get their household goods second hand from family? Does Philips complain that they don't get any money from people using their vacuum cleaners 2nd hand? Well, perhaps they do, but who cares. 2nd hand goods are normal.
How many first time car buyers buy a new car? Or even a 2nd hand car? 3rd and even 4th hand are common. Does anybody care if the car makers complain about this? Of course not, the 2nd hand car industry is triving and a big part of the economy and the only way most of us can afford a car.
Who of you lives in a new house? A 2nd hand house? I have lived in places (actually lived in a castle once) that were hundreds of years old. 30th hand perhaps? Nobody would take an constructor serious who wants a piece of sale price every time a house changes hands again.
So why is the game industry different?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Did they not just put out GOW2, an amazing sequel to an amazing game!
Console gaming has nothing to do with it, nor is it something to get too upset about. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Kinda easy, if you think about it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I imagine those are NPD numbers, so it only says a lot about North America. Other parts of the world do exist, and the numbers very well could be a lot different. Also, keep in mind that NPD numbers rarely, if ever, include digital sales. They only include retail sales.