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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."
In other news, used car sales are hurting car manufacturers even more lately, when they're already beleaguered by rising petrol prices and a struggling economy. Ford executives recently commented that used car sales are "extremely painful," while eBay's CEO unsurprisingly came out in support of resales. David Braben, chairman of UK-based car manufacturer Frontier Development had this to say: "Five years ago, a great car would have sold for a longer period of time than for a bad car â" which was essentially our incentive to make great cars. But no longer. Now manufacturers just see revenue the initial few weeks regardless of the car's quality and then gamers start buying used cars which generates money that goes into eBay'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.
If making a game is always resulting in a loss, it wouldn't make any sense ( business or otherwise ) to continue making games.
Therefore, I can only conclude that making a game is *still* profitable ( despite everything ) and would just like to say:
Be happy you are making profit and stop whining about how much.
That goes for **AA too!
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
If it makes them feel any better...I have never bought or sold a used game. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of my purchases in the past year have been digital. That does come at the cost that I only buy good games from companies that treat me properly.
Beyond that..of course it effects prices. That being said, you can't do anything about it. Once purchased, the game is mine to sell. The best (for them, that is) thing to do is to abandon singleplayer and focus on subscription and account based games. I'd be devastated though. You already took away KOTOR 3, don't take away ME2 and whatever else you can think of.
That's what this is. They want a piece of the pie. Anyone who buys into this idea is an idiot. No one is going to pay $60 for a shitty game.
that the used game market is affecting price and quality, my first response is GREAT! Market forces at work are driving new game prices down and quality up as developers are forced to compete with a robust substitute good: the used game.
Then I realize its more of the same FUD campaign put on by the mega-corporations to prep us for invasive mechanisms inserted into games with the end goal of bilking us for more $$$. I think I'll avoid supporting this industry and stick to indie games until they have an attitude shift.
...yes yes, its all ther nasty consumers fault! You bundle crapware drm and we don't buy it, uhuh, thats my fault. You release the game for £50-60 quid, and somehow, especially in the current economic crisis, I find that I'd rather pay for food and shelter over GENERICFIFASPORTGAME-2009. Im even more evil for thinking that second hand at £20-30, I might just be able to afford it without sending you more money after its first sale.
Oh, I also apologize when i decide not to buy your £50 game, because you decided you could, infact, split it into 3 seperate games and sell it that way for more than £100, for pure greed (Hi Starcraft2!). Im so very sorry. Also, do forgive me when i refuse to buy your game at all, because you decided that buying the game second hand means im njot entitled to the full game, because I also decided you weren't worthy to survive as a games company anymore (GOW2).
And "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."
No Im sorry, games just aren't as good as they were, because I recall buying and trading in games for second hand games more than 5 years ago. So that hasn't changed, must be the games eh?
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
the technology that we use to play these games has improved greatly over the past 5 years. so why aren't the games that are played on this hardware getting any better?
rather than bitch about how no one is buying your new games, start making good games that get me excited, so I want to go and buy them right away.
when you make a game that most likely sucks, i can't return, and infects my computer with another one of your DRM viruses, im not going to get all excited about it.
i still play red alert 2, unreal trournament, doom, a link to the past, etc, because those are great games that i enjoy playing.
start making games that are fun, and i will start buying. Or, you can recycle the crappy games from last year, throw in a few more polygons to make things pretty and go out of business.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I gave up on console games after I read an article about how 80% of computer games bought are never finished. I don't really have much time to spare on games any more and find my gaming needs are more than catered for by browser based flash games. (Then again my idea of the perfect gaming experience is an entertaining and only mildly taxing point and click adventure.)
Anyway, seems to me that spending so much time and energy on flare effects and 3D physics and primo voice talent and cinematic effects is draining the industry of money. But nobody can ever get enough of things like Tetris, sure you might get sick of it for a bit but one day... one day... you are looking at those old falling blocks and you can't resist one more rotate and slot.
You want to absorb the costs of the used games market? Or damage it? Stop making vapid eye candy people bore of in seconds. With all the spare budget you have finance the production of your new more playable, less sugar frosting games.
Pretty impresses for ten minutes. Substance makes something a keeper.
www.nodicerpg.com - Some RP stuff for free, some not so for free, but still cheap.
Two facts:
* The high price of game creates the 2nd hand market.
* The high price 2nd hand market helps people afford new games, by selling their old games.
Putting up the price of new games isn't going to change those facts, in fact it will raise the price of 2nd hand games making the market more lucrative and increasing the amount of trade in 2nd hand games.
Preventing games from being sold 2nd hand will reduce what buyers can afford for new games.
Folk only have so much money to spend on games, after all!
I used to regularly spend about 1 GBP ($2) a week at charity shops buying books at 10-20 pence each. (They'd go back to charity shops to be re-sold when I'd finished with them)
Then the shops went "up market" and started selling at 50p - 1 pound each and now they don't get any of my money at all.
Games industry is going the same way.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
and you won't have this problem affecting your revenue stream.
I think one should be asking what makes people want to trade in a game after just one week of ownership.
"That's in addition to the fact that we don't see anything from the used-game sales, which is one reason why the price of new games throughout the industry remains artificially high," he says. "I mean, the industry has to make all its money from the first sale since we don't get a penny from the subsequent dozen or so sales of that same game."
Competition drives prices up!? Don't treat us like morons. If used sales went down why would they reduce the price? To make less money? I can see that being a great business strategy.
Why are resales so popular in the first place? Because games are really expensive and have a short life.
I'd also like to point out that while the observation that 80% of money from trade ins is spent on games is interesting, the car resale analogy is a little misleading. Cars are assets. They're purchased with the expectation of a certain level of depreciation. Games are to an extent but it's not nearly as big a factor in the purchase.
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!
This is just plain fud. Being able to sell a game once you've played it increases the reason to buy it. Especially when the game is short, possibly bad or has no replayability value.
aka Gardener, aka ollej
The used market helps sell new games.
Some subset of early-adopter gamers are not going to buy new games at brand new prices unless they know they can turn around and sell the game to get back some of that value. This is especially true since early-adopter gamers are the ones taking the risk on the games. In this capacity, the used market actually helps you.
The used market is not the money factory you claim.
If there was truly so much money to be had in the used market you would drop your prices without hesitation in order to compete. If there was that much money you should have no problem making up for lowered prices with increased sales. The fact that you do not do this illustrates very clearly that there is not that much money being 'lost'.
David Braben, you are a remarkable idiot.
Not only have you stated that money is your "essential" motivation for creating great games - which leads me to wonder if your firm is capable of making a great game - but you have made it very clear that your firm has no incentive (read: plan) to create great games in the future.
ow publishers and developers just see revenue the initial few weeks regardless of the game's quality and then gamers start buying used copies
And where do those used games come from? Those high quality games, that people are going to keep playing for years, how did they get into the used game store a few weeks after release?
Maybe this is not really "regardless of the game's quality", but rather that NONE of the games you make have a replay value of more than a few weeks.
Used games exist so deal with it. There are a lot of things that would affect how many people bought your games. If used games were outlawed then more people might buy games. If computers had hardware DRM that prevented any game from being played unless it phoned home to the game manufacturer, people might buy more games. If the government mandated that people buy at least 2 games a week, people would buy more games. That's not the world we're living in, so I guess the games industry has to do what everyone else has to do and cater to their existing customers. They're not entitled to protection for their business plans, and them saying that it's used games that's causing decrease in quality and affecting price is bullshit. When the demand for new games drops because there are used games, the rules of the market dictate that the companies have to LOWER their prices to compensate. Not raise them. People aren't buying them already! Why would they buy them at a higher cost? And, in turn, if the market forces you to lower your price, then you have to spend less making games. This doesn't necessarily dictate a decrease in quality. Look at World of Goo, Penny Arcade Adventures, Enigmo, Field Runners, Castle Crashers or Braid. Those games are dirt cheap to make, and are fun and original. This means that there might not be a Gears of War 3 or a Call of Duty 5, but you could make 10 Portals for the price of 1 Gears of War. I've been playing more games than ever before, and they haven't been AAA titles. They've been $20 games that I buy off XBox Live Arcade or the iPhone App Store, or from indie developers. I also bought The Force Unleashed, a highly anticipated AAA title, and it's been sitting on my shelf collecting dust. From my perspective it's never been better to be a gamer. There are so many choices for distribution and the barrier to entry has never been lower so there are a lot of inexpensive, entertaining games out. That's the biggest danger to the mainstream game market. And next time I think about putting up $60 for a supposed AAA title, I'll hold out a week and get it used.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
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.
If you want me to buy "Megagame 2" but don't want me to sell my copy of "Megagame 1" in case it creates competition for your Megagame 2 sales, then offer me a voucher for my copy of Megagame 1 (you only need to match or slightly better the price places like Gamestop would pay me). Said voucher to to be used when purchasing Megagame 2 )or another of your product line).
Then when you have my copy of Megagame 1, you can destroy it so it never threatens your future sales again.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
first, I've been playing PC games for over 2 decades.
Quality has dropped drastically. Technology increased which gave the illusion of high quality. Games today are a horrendous value compared to just ten years ago. Content has dropped from an observed average of 25 hours of gameplay to around 6 hours. Half the budget is blown by publishers on marketing. Publishers have also gotten quite complacent about their position in the industry. When you have more than 3 sequels, it's easy to forget about innovation.
Since games are so short these days, people go through them faster. Thus they go to the retailers what sell used games.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Oh, really? Great games don't sell beyond the first weeks? Leaving aside that the only recent Frontier Development title I know about is Lost Winds, a download-only game that obviously can't be resold, many games are selling for a long time. Nintendo manages to make games that keep selling a lot for months or even years (a quick check on Amazon shows Mario Kart DS at the top of the DS charts, a game that came out some time last year IIRC). Perhaps the games Braben observed just weren't that great and didn't really deserve long sales?
Besides, used game sales aren't a new thing, many of my SNES and Game Boy games came from fleamarkets.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I have a large collection of games that I'm never selling. I love them and periodically replay them, just like favorite movies. Baldur's gate 2 would be one. Ya it's an old game but I still like it. I replay it maybe once a year or every other year. I probably will for a long time too. You could compare it to the Princess Bride. Ya I saw that movie when I was 10. Guess what? I own the DVD. I like it. I don't watch it every day or anything but I watch it now and again. I'm not selling either game or DVD because I want to have them to replay.
Funny thing is truly good games DO seem to sell well for a long time. An example would be Oblivion. It took forever for that game to go under it's $50 opening price, and it is STILL on some shelves as a standard box title at $20-30, not in the budget isle. Reason is it is an excellent game and sales remained strong enough enough to justify the higher price. They drop the price when sales start dropping below a certain point.
The problem is for companies that make games that have no depth, no replay value. They may be entertaining, but only for a very short while. So someone will play them and go "Huh ok, done with that," and then get rid of it. Well sorry guys, but that's life. Don't like it? Spend time making sure your game has lasting appeal.
Same deal with movies. There are plenty of movies that I've watched rental or from a friend that I've said "Ya ok that's entertaining," but had no interest at all in owning. Once was enough. I'm sure those movie companies would really like more money but too bad, I'm not interested in it. You want me to pay the higher price to own it? It's got to be good enough I want to rewatch it.
If playing games ever taught you anything, it should be that cars are something you steal.
Just keep in mind, regardless of all the doom and gloom reports, the Games industry is still posting new record profits year on year, so it's obviously not that big a problem.
What they really mean is they want to make even more profit and rather than produce games that are of better quality and/or appeal to wider audiences they want to keep shifting the same old crap but make more from it.
Make no mistake, the whole Spore DRM debacle had nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with preventing second hand sales. The games industry has set it's sights on the second hand market as a way to increase profits without increasing effort, I do not think it will win, but accept consumers to have to listen to whines from the industry and take it from behind on DRM and stuff for a little while yet.