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Why Game Developers Should Shut Up About Used Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-that-they-will dept.

Ssquared22 writes "It may feel like a rip-off to some, but you've got to admit that paying $30 for Gears of War 2 sure beats paying $60! Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them, and companies like Gamestop continue to laugh all the way to the bank. In an article at Crispy Gamer, David Thomas dissects one of the most critical issues in gaming today: used games and merchants (online and brick-and-mortar) who specialize in this 'sleight of hand.'"

11 of 590 comments (clear)

  1. Great advertising for new versions! by flowsnake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let's say I buy $GAME second hand for $30. Perhaps I'll like it enough to buy the sequel $GAME_2 new, full price, when it comes out and not wait.

    1. Re:Great advertising for new versions! by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I wont. I'm done paying full retail for games. I buy lots of games when they hit the $19.95 mark. almost no games I own cost more than that. I refuse to pay the stupid $70.00 each for a game. that's nuts.

      but then I also am the guy that pisses off the EB clerks and got Fallout 3 for $20.00 when they offered the guy turning it in $10.00 for it.

      I slapped the guy a 20 and he gave me the game. I left before the pimple faced manager could stop choking on his burger to yell at me.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    2. Re:Great advertising for new versions! by Old97 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's like the old argument against piracy - but even more so.

      The "even more so" is that reselling a game and buying used games is perfectly legal and violates the rights of no one. Game developers need to respect the rights of their customers and shut up.

      --
      Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
    3. Re:Great advertising for new versions! by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've found a great money-saving approach to buying games that doesn't involve "used" games. Unfortunately, with more and more games having significant online components, it's going to be harder and harder to get full value from a used game if the company (EA for one example of a company that doesn't believe you own the thing you have purchased) doesn't want you to.

      I no longer jump on a brand new game, and instead wait until the price comes down, which it eventually does, every time. The wait can be from 2 or 3 months to as much as a year, but eventually the game will sell for about 1/4 of its original price. You can buy Bioshock or Fallout 3 or Far Cry 2 for about $19 bucks now, brand new. And when you get the game, you don't enjoy it any less because you didn't have it on day one.

      Even if it's a matter of wanting to have the game all your friends are playing, I've found it's easy enough for a group of friends to decide to wait a while to play the new game, unless your friends are dicks who have rich parents who will buy then anything they want at any price. I just today bought Left4Dead with three of my friends who had similarly waited. The four of us saved over $100 off the 0-day price, which'll pay for a nice bag of weed and some beer for the Left4Dead party we will surely have. The other benefit was we didn't have to all run out and upgrade our computers to play Left4Dead, because the normal rate of upgrading has already caught our systems up to the recommended system requirements. The video card I would have had to buy the first day Left4Dead came out probably dropped in price by 70% when I got around to buying it 8 months later.

      Realize, you don't have to do what advertisers and marketers tell you to do. It's possible to live a rich and fulfilled life without reacting to hype like a coke addicted monkey pulling a lever.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    4. Re:Great advertising for new versions! by jcnnghm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So who is going to produce these multi-million dollar games when anyone can copyright and distribute them without restriction? You do realize there have been more than a few games that have cost over $40M to produce. The average PS3 game costs $15M before marketing. Hell, even Pacman cost $100K to develop in the 80s. Which business do you think is going to invest $15M in a product that they can't protect. I guess you could point to all the wonderful F/OSS games that are out there, like... wait.

      The only way copyright will be reformed is if considerably more restrictive DRM is developed, so you don't need the law to prevent people from duplicating your product. You'll probably see that anyway with online distribution to hurt the resale market.

      --
      You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
    5. Re:Great advertising for new versions! by JStegmaier · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In other words, they get to charge such high prices because users can sell the game later and recoup some of the loss.

      Which completely explains why digitally distributed games are so much cheaper. You can't reseller them, and the publisher doesn't have to pay for packaging, shipping, etc.

      No, no wait. Digitally distributed games cost the exact same fucking amount.

    6. Re:Great advertising for new versions! by jcnnghm · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm going to take GTA 4, and show you exactly why you are wrong.

      If no one wants to pay for them, no one wants them produced. So if no one wants them to be produced... why should you produce them? (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)

      GTA 4 sold over 13 million copies. Obviously, people did want it produced. The issue is, of those 13 million people, how many people would individually have the $100 million it cost to produce, and would be willing to spend $100 million to have a game produced, if after it was produced anyone could copy it. Probably none.

      They dont have to be produced if theres no market for them. (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)

      But there is a market for them, so long as they can't be freely copied so that the investors can get their money back. How else do games sell millions of copies.

      How about stopping the production of the product until the people realize (all by themselves, with no censorship and mass punishment laws needed) that they really really really have to pay you to get it?

      You should follow that up by wishing really really hard that you can really really alter human nature.

      And by the way, the law absolutely doesnt prevent anybody to "duplicate" your product, it just fuck ups the lives (really badly) of the few poor fellas who happen to get caught. The silent majority just keeps copying because nobody, really nobody outside of the circles directly profiting from copying prohibition considers sharing, copying and passing on of culture even remotely wrong or illegal.

      Bullshit. How many commercial vendors selling copied media exist and openly operate in the United States. None. How about in China? So the law doesn't work? You might want to reevaluate your notions.

      I'll even go so far as to help you out with your next most obvious line of reasoning, and why that won't work.

      You don't need one guy to fund it man. Everybody could throw in a little bit of money, man, like a coop, man, and people that had talent could add a little time, and they could work on a game idea. So there wouldn't be any profit man, it would just be totally community driven.

      And what happens if the game sucks.

      They could all just keep working on it.

      Or in the alternative, you could allow investors to shoulder that risk, and in exchange be allowed the exclusive right to distribute and charge for the produced material. This way, if the game sucks, you don't have to spend any money on it. But if the game is good, you've got to give the investor some money to cover his cost, plus some to cover his risk, plus some to provide a return on his investment to encourage him to take the risk to begin with. Of course, if people could just copy it, the investor wouldn't be able to recoup the investment, so he wouldn't be able to do it. So maybe there could be some kind of law for that. But that kind of brings us full circle doesn't it.

      --
      You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
  2. Lower your price! by darkmeridian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Game companies should progressively lower prices of their games as time passes. This would eat up the used game market.

    --
    A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
    1. Re:Lower your price! by iron-kurton · · Score: 5, Funny

      Same should be done with music. Eventually, you'll start getting paid to listen to Van Halen's Jump (as one should be)

      --
      Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
  3. "sleight of hand" by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anyone who describes selling used anything this way is clearly so out of touch with reality that their opinion on the subject isn't worth listening to.

    The primary reason that game developers (and marketers) should shut up about used games? It's not because it may act as advertising for their future games, although that's a valid economic argument. It's because if you buy something, you own it, and it is yours to do with as you wish. Don't talk about "selling" people games if you're not willing to, you know, sell them. Rent them out, whatever. But when you agree to have your products on store shelves (store, not rental facility) or listed as "for sale" in online catalogs, you are giving up the right to control what people do with the physical media after they buy them. Period. End of story. Game over, man, game over.

    Movie studios, music labels, book publishers: you too.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  4. Developers need to do the math by Itchyeyes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Developers and publishers are under the, mistaken, impression that they're missing out on huge revenue stream through used games. Let's assume that I buy a game for $60. Once I'm done with it, I sell it, either through Gamestop or Amazon for about $20 net. They take a $10 commission and sell it to someone else for $30. In this scenario developers seem to think that they've missed out on a single $60 from the person who bought it at $30 used, but that just isn't the case.

    First of all, the person who waited for a used copy at $30 isn't going to spend $60 in the absence of a used copy. They're going to wait until the new copies are about $30 and buy it then. Giving them fewer choices of how to spend their money does not magically give them more money to spend. Also, the person who bought the game at $60, didn't just buy a game. They bought a game that they knew they could sell for ~$20. By stripping out the ability to resell the game you lower the value of the game to the initial buyer as well. So without the used option, the developer doesn't get two $60 sales, they get one $40 sale and one $30 sale. But they have to pay for all the production, shipping, packing, etc... costs for a second copy of the game as well. So at the end of the day the net gain is more or less zero.