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Game Designer Makes Case For Used Games
We've recently had a couple of discussions about the plans of various game developers to fight used game sales — in particular, the idea of a free, one-time download that may be bonus content or may be a vital part of the game. Now, Soren Johnson, a game designer who has worked on Civilization 3, Civilization 4 and Spore, has written an article defending certain aspects of the used game market. Quoting:
"By opening up retail sales to a larger segment of the market, used game sales mean that more people are playing our games than would be in a world without them. Beyond the obvious advantages of bigger community sizes and word-of-mouth sales, a larger player base can benefit game developers who are ready to earn secondary income from their games. In-game ads are one source of this additional revenue, but the best scenario is downloadable content. A used copy of Rock Band may go through several owners, but each one of them may give Harmonix money for their own personal rights to 'Baba O'Riley' or 'I Fought the Law.'"
Maybe the used game markey exists because a lot of older games are still fun, despite being old? Age has nothing to do with enjoyability -- just because it doesn't look like a nature park and cost three hundred dollars doesn't mean it can't do that.
"Bookstores ban used books to encourage new-book sales and interest"
"Toyota combats used car market to promote new 2009 line of vehicles"
"Microsoft restricts sale of XP to encourage Vista sales"
Well, okay, you can't win 'em all.
As gamers age, they begin to seek out copies of games they played as kids. I know I have and I promise I'm not alone.
If you want to make more money, fighting the used game market isn't the way to go. Release a system for $100, make the games $10, and then we'll talk.
Maybe paying $50-$100 for a single game tends to turn some people off.
Anyway, why is the used market so good? For people who don't have any money, the used market allows them to get good games cheaply. (I've never had much money either for that matter, but the main reason I don't buy games now is that I don't run MS Windows.)
Used games are not only good for people who don't have money, but also for the ones who buy a lot of games (usually on the release date), play through them, and then never touch them again. This is of course highly dependent on the game. Some games just lose their appeal once you've defeated the final stage (or whatever). It happens to me a lot, so I decided to sell them again, preferring a couple of bucks in my hand (to buy beer, for instance) instead of a gazillion of games gathering dust somewhere in a drawer.
That's the question that comes to me ... I mean, they sell me a copy of the game, right? Since when do they have a legal right to prohibit me from reselling it? I can't think of another type of product where this can be done legally ...
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And offer a discount on upcoming titles, entry into beta testing rounds or early access to the full game. It's a business no-brainer but is hamstrung by the industry habit splitting production from distribution.
I would say this whole anti-secondary sale issue is another example of the blind greed that is currently taring down the banks.
The gaming industry is starting to eat itself.
It's something else to watch these gigantic corporate entities try to turn sharing, borrowing, and reselling into the next big evil. You'd think they'd stand no chance of getting the popular vote on this, but everywhere now you start to see ordinary regular people asking the question: What can be done about the second hand market?
The more pertinent question is: What the fuck? followed by You are kidding, right?
No other industry enjoys this priviledge. Not even the RIAA is seriously trying to argue that you can't sell a used CD, and they've argued that ripping to MP3s is stealing, and that you need to buy a new copy every time you listen on a new device.
The part I find the most ignorant and self-serving is the part where people talk about the damage it is doing to the industry. The industry is not an end in itself. It adapts to market pressures, or it doesn't. As an ordinary, rational consumer there's nothing that I need or want to do for the industry. They produce games at affordable prices, and just suck up the fact that I am not going to buy all of them as first sales, or they don't.
Something everybody seems to forget in the talk about the evil of second hand sales, is that every one of them, no matter how dilute from reselling, must have been a first sale at some point.
And for crying out loud - what happened to just being thrilled that someone wanted to play your shitty game at all?
Someone needs to kill these stupid fuckers like *right now*. I'm Serious.
Advertising ruins everything. I don't want to immerse myself in a game and have to put up with some bullshit about what drink is better, and that I need to buy this widget cuz the cool kids got it.
There is a cold war going on right now with advertisers and consumers and advertisers love using stupid bullshit arguments with ignorant judges like, "Not watching commercials is just like stealing content". That's why TIVO is going to cave soon under enormous pressure to thwart people from bypassing advertising and why the old company that made that DVR with the automatic commercial skip got sued into oblivion. They resurrected themselves as ReplayTV, but sans commercial skip.
We fight it everywhere in our lives right now. From blocking pop-ups, pixels, Ad Block Plus, the 30-second skip button on the DVR, etc.
How the fuck can you advertise a contemporary product for today's culture in a game like NeverWinter nights anyways? I would love to go down the local tavern to find my +5 Broadsword only to be faced with a "Do the Dew" logo on the front of it. Sheesh.
We all have to put our foot down now and REFUSE to participate in this else the games will be ruined. If you think I'm going overboard here, then present me a situation in which an advertisement actually adds real entertainment value?
Here's my case for used game sales.
By making it so I can't resell the entirety of my game by giving me a nontransferable license for a portion of the game's content, the publisher is stealing from me. Specifically, they're taking away the resale value of the goods I purchased from them by attempting to treat them as a privileged service instead. This emerging trend of nontransferable content licensing as rights management represents a profoundly backward view of commerce that attempts to justify undermining competition from resale companies by attacking the customer.
Everyone knows that this has nothing to do with eBay or old fashioned brick and mortar video stores. It has everything to do with Gamestop and the like. Publishers realize that when many gamers purchase a game they don't hold onto it long, and the major chain resellers can buy it back and put it on the market again for a profit, theoretically causing the publisher to lose sales.
Well, guess what? That's life. That's how virtually every good in the history of man has been treated. We buy something, we retain it while it has value to us, and we either dispose of it or give it away when we're done. It's not the resale company's fault that your products aren't valuable enough for the customer to want to keep them even though most major resale companies rip them off for a fraction of what the customer paid you for the game, and just because you brats think you're entitled to those sales doesn't mean you can take away one of my basic rights to product ownership. Maybe you should have capitalized on the booming resale market while you had the chance instead of complaining that Gamestop has its fork on your already overloaded plate.
This isn't just about maintaining robust game communities (which aren't profitable) or watering down Gamestop's bread and butter. This is my yard sale. This is eBay. This is my right to resale. Nontransferable content licensing as rights management is nothing but anti-competition against resellers and renters, and a scary and completely unnecessary trend that attacks consumer rights in order to cause the market to function in a way that unfairly favors the publisher. It should be considered criminal.
Maybe before people like Mike Capps and the bigwigs at Nintendo start considering making boneheaded moves like this, they should bone up on economics! Oh, what's that? Marketplace dynamics don't apply to software because it's not a tangible good? Baloney!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_saturation
As a parent of three boys, I only buy used. I'm not fuc#en rich, and games are absurdly priced. I have other bills to take care of first, like mortgage, car, gas, food, etc. If they stop selling used older games, I'll stop buying. End of story.
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
Thus selling them on is the way to go I feel.
Close. The publishing companies are pissed at how Gamestop prioritizes new vs. second hand games in the stores. More shelf space is devoted to second hand games, rather than new games. Additionally sales assistants are trained to offer up the second-hand version if the consumer takes a new version to the counter, as there is more mark-up for Gamestop on the second-hand title.
I'm not going to comment on who is right or wrong here, but I am going to note that pusblishers do not like it. Once Gamestop / EB were their presence on the high street, now their exclusivity has gone, they feel their sales are being diluted. Both companies need business models that work for them, and this is what we are witnessing; the tuning of the parameters to maximize returns. The ones that work out will stay.
In the old days, many games had replayability because that was all they had space for. Early Atari, NES titles were almost universally replayable because they were designed that way.
These days, game companies seem to think that "replayability" is a buzzword, just like they think that padding "Hours of gameplay" with pointless and boring stuff (think the stupid "sail the world and haul shit up from the ocean for 100 hours" bit before you get to the end of Celda:The Wind Breaker, thank god nintendo finally learned their lesson for Twilight Princess). Or, they make a game that's short, and only kind of fun, but with a number of "unlockable" characters to play through each of which has more absurd unlock requirements tied to the previous (Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, I'm looking at you).
After finishing these games once, I'm done. I see no reason to "replay" them, and so I sell them off and get new games. If they had been made to be more fun and less aggravating, that wouldn't be the case.
Here's a hint: if you feel the need to pad your "gameplay hours" or stick extra nonsense-characters in for "replayability", you're doing something wrong and need to fix your game instead.
I recently graduated college and got a job. Now that I have a source of income, I started to look at getting a current-gen game system. But after doing the math ($250-$400 console + $50-60 x number of games) I decided that since I still have my GameCube, and there were plenty of games for it that I would like to play and didn't already own, I would fall into the used games market. So I have been playing lots more games lately, but the game industry hasn't seen a dime from me. And you know what? Tony Hawk 4 is just as fun now as it was then, and it cost less than 6 bucks including shipping (just as one example). By the way, don't shop for used games at GameStop, you can get them brand new online for cheaper.
And if I buy 'Baba O'Riley' or 'I Fought the Law,' then give it to whoever I sell Rock Band to?
With physical property, it is clear that as a consumer, I have the right to do with that physical property as I see fit, including transferring ownership in full to another individual. For example, if I buy a book, I can give the book to someone, I can sell it to them, etc.
I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why the same should not be true of electronic content. Certainly, if I buy a game I should not be able to give or sell someone else a copy of that game while retaining a copy for my own use. However, there should be no restriction on me giving it or selling it to another person, including any additional content I've purchased.
Book authors derive no revenue from the secondary market. Musicians derive no revenue from the secondary market (though there are multiple primary markets, including radio play, licensing songs for use in movies, games, etc.) Why do game designers feel they have the inalienable right to derive revenue from the secondary market?
If they are so jealous of Gamestop, why not sell used copies from their own website?
Because they don't want anyone to sell used copies.
Gaming is trying to move toward the model the RIAA has been working toward for a while now -- that they sell a disposable good. Electronic Arts would be just as happy if you broke the disc in half and threw it it the gutter as you were leaving Gamestop. They have your money and the transaction is done. If you want more entertainment, buy another new game.
Think about it this way: the "old paradigm" was books. You bought a book, it was yours. Lend it out, give it away, borrow one from the library -- the publisher didn't really care because more people reading means more books sold, one way or another.
The new paradigm is an amusement park. You can go and have fun, but once you leave, all you have is memories. You can tell someone else about how fun it was, but they'll have to pay for their own ticket to experience it themselves. You can't re-sell your old ticket to get in the park, and you can't go back in yourself with it. You have to pay all over again. That's what the entertainment industry wants because they decided it's just easier to get your money and be done with it.
Since you know you can sell your old games, you don't mind paying a few bucks more with the knowledge you'll get some money back. Since you'll pay a few bucks more, the publisher can get a few extra bucks, indirectly, from the used game buyer.
You know, this is sounding like market segmentation. Marketing companies pay millions to figure out how to sell the same product at different price points to different people, extracting the max cash each segment is willing to pay. And here the used game market is doing that for software publishers. Publishers would be silly to try to outright kill the used market.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.