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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.
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.