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Used Game Market Affecting Price, Quality of New Titles
Gamasutra is running a feature discussing the used game market with various developers and analysts. The point has been raised by many members of the industry that used game sales are hurting developers and publishers even more lately, when they're already beleaguered by rising piracy rates and a struggling economy. Atari executives recently commented that used game sales are "extremely painful," while GameStop's CEO unsurprisingly came out in support of resales. We've recently discussed a few of the ways game designers are considering to limit used game sales. David Braben, chairman of UK-based developer Frontier Development had this to say: "Five years ago, a great game would have sold for a longer period of time than for a bad game — which was essentially our incentive to make great games. But no longer. Now publishers and developers just see revenue the initial few weeks regardless of the game's quality and then gamers start buying used copies which generates money that goes into GameStop's pocket, nobody else's."
We should bail out the game industry?
After all, if it goes under, we'll get a lot of people, who spend hours gaming, not gaming anymore. This means less soda and junk food to snack on, which in turn, means the junk food industry will be hurt, which, in turn, means more layoffs.
Rubbish games don't sell the first time arround.
Books, CDs, movies... these are all forms of entertainment that lose a lot of their value once they've been viewed once. If game companies don't want people reselling games, they need to make some kind of incentive for people to hold onto their games, and make the gameplay actually enjoyable so that people keep the game to enjoy, rather than just to finish the single-player content once. Great examples of this are the Smash Bros. series and the Halo series. Both are enjoyable to play with friends (or online) after you've finished the single-player campaign. Things like XBox achievements do a lot to add replayability to games, but if the games aren't inherently fun, then even they can't save a game.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
the movie industry saying the same thing about rental shops when they first came out. They ended up dropping the price of videotapes (Yes, I'm old. Deal.) from $50 to $19.95. They don't seem to complain about that any more. Maybe if the game companies dropped the prices to begin with, more people would buy them when they first come out.
I find it rather strange that numerous $randomSlashDotPosters can figure this out and that almost none of the game companies can.
Don't they hire, like, market dudes or something ? Or are we specially gifted around here ?
What's wrong with all those companies that keep on acting like divas all the time... "waaah, I've been obnoxious and painted myself in a corner, it's all the fault of my nasty customers, of p2p, of unmetered access, of sunspots, of the falling market, of terrorism..."
[/rant]
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The price has remained the same, but remember that back in the days of yore a lot more cost of the game was involved in it's medium. The ROM chips (and sometimes additional processors, batteries, etc) used in cartridges way back when were orders of magnitude more expensive than the CD's and DVD's that games ship on now (which cost maybe $0.15 per disc to produce). So yes, development costs have gone up, but that's the only reason prices should remain the same. Without that games would logically cost half as much as they do now given the reduction in media cost.
$50-60 today is not the same as $50-60 in 1985. Adjusted for inflation, game prices are decreasing while production costs are increasing...
Yeah, I hate that argument too - it annoyed the crap out of me when the oil companies used it to defend rising gas prices. Nonetheless, there is some truth to it.