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Fable III Dev: Used Game Sales More Costly Than Piracy
eldavojohn writes "A developer working for Lionhead, the studio behind Fable III, told Eurogamer that piracy is 'less problematic' than used game sales, from a business perspective. Mike West, the lead combat designer for the latest Fable, said, 'For us it's probably a no-lose even with piracy as it is. But, as I say, second-hand sales cost us more in the long-run than piracy these days.' So downloading a game is bad, but apparently stopping by a second-hand store to pick up a licensed physical copy of the game ends up hurting them even more."
Ford, Toyota, etc. would LOVE it if the only option was to buy new.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Except when it gets them a sale because the person buying knows he can recoup some of the cost by selling the game second hand.
Game developer good at developing games, not so good at understanding economics.
The summary doesn't account for the very real possibility that a much higher percentage of used game buyers would have bought the game than pirates, had neither had a choice.
In other words, if you look at 100 pirates and 10 used buyers, and stop the piracy and used market, maybe 5 used buyers would pony up, but only maybe 3 pirates. But I'm just pulling those numbers out of the air - you can't say either way without hard numbers, and they're' not being presented here.
But I think we've all figured out at this point that a high piracy rate doesn't have to translate into a lot of lost sales. Every time we hear the "industry" cry the pirates are costing them money, they're conveniently counting every pirated copy as a lost sale, which is so far into fantasy land that it crosses clearly into insulting our intelligence.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Isn't this true of any industry? If I buy a used couch instead of buying it from the manufacturer, don't they take the same "loss"? It's amazing that now used games sales are being considered "loss" in the same manner as piracy.
And the second hand buyers have actually proven they are willing to pay some price for the product, and not nothing at all.
And of course, the thought of making a game good enough and non-buggy enough that people do not want to just sell it off, never occurs to them.
I can really see this being true. Game piracy does nothing more than get your game's name out there. People are playing it, talking about it, etc. Pretty much no one (statistically) who pirates a game intended on ever purchasing it and thus aren't lost revenue.
People buying used games intended on purchasing the game, but bought used to save $5. They did nothing wrong, but they were a potential source of revenue for the publisher that is lost.
I don't know of a good "fix," because I don't support limiting your right to resell, but at the same time the scale that EB/etc do it causes issues.
In my mind, morally, it's a bit like piracy itself. Me sharing an mp3 rip of an album I've bought with 3-4 friends is not "wrong" in my mind. Were I to rip an album and then sell it on the street for $5 a copy it would be a different story. How you legislate intent and morality, without killing genuine "sharing," is tough.
The problem is that when you plunk out your money to buy the shiny new, it is not a sale. Legally, you're buying a "license" to use the game, which gives game companies the ability to dictate and/or change the terms of those license at their will.
It's not really SCOTUS that needs to address it, it's Congress. We need a law that basically says, "If it looks like a sale, acts like a sale, works like a sale, then it's a sale." Software shouldn't be able to be licensed except in very specific circumstances, none of which apply to individual end users purchasing entertainment software.
If SCOTUS did take up the issue, they need to basically rule most EULAs unconscionable.
At any rate, I doubt any of that will happen any time soon. People are too addicted to that hot new Xbox/PS3/PC game to worry about little details like consumer rights.
Wouldn't more reasonable prices for new games take the wind out of the huge second-hand games business?
Epic, as in Epic Megagames (sorry, forgot they dropped the mega).
Just got 1 copy of Bullet Storm. We have 2 XBoxes. Only one player at a time can load the game in their personal Xbox. However, to access any of the online play features the second player has to purchase a $10 "online pass". Hint: XBL is largely a peer to peer network, hence "Selecting New Host" -- We're not playing on their dedicated servers, only the player's own XBoxes and the MS sponsored matchmaking is needed -- both I've already pay for twice (once for each player in the house). Granted, some in-game stats & ranking may be an excuse to run a separate server and charge for hosting -- but an additional mandatory $10 just to play online? Inexcusable (note: MS servers store the achievements).
From MS Game Studio Docs:
Any matchmaking scenario involves the creation of a network session. Network sessions give XNA Framework games access to profile data on all the gamers in a potential game.
Perhaps they don't use XNA, and roll their own instead -- whos fault is that?
Seems like a non-issue to me as long as this type of XBL lock-out extortion racket is allowed (Even moreso a non issue for me since I've added Epic Games to the list of abusive companies I boycott).
Sounds like me. There are lots of games I look at and think, "$20 is kinda steep," and then remind myself if I don't like it I can just sell it on amazon and recoup my costs.
Same with books. Same with DVDs. (But not CDs unfortunately, which appear to be near-zero when used.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
In this age of Call Of Duty 3000, people even sell on games they like and get the sequel.
The obvious solution is to release games at the 'used' price point, then everyone will consider it worth it from the start. There wouldn't be much of a used market if all the guys who wait for sensible prices buy the game as soon as it's released.. you'd still get some supercheap guys who want used copies, but not that many. Especially when physical media dies out! I wonder if people sell Steam accounts..
which is totally what she said
No value is "lost" in the second hand market. A lot of people find buying a game for $69.95 to be ridiculous, and will never ever do it. Those "sales" are already "lost" because the producers are placing the price higher than the value. Make games a better value and you will get more sales.
The point was that stopping by a second-hand store to pick up a licensed physical copy of the game gets a developer zero revenue, as opposed to stopping by a first-hand retailer to pick up a licensed physical copy of the game.
But there's absolutely no reason to believe that someone who can't sell the game second-hand would still buy it at full price or that someone who buys games second-hand would buy them at full price if buying second-hand wasn't an option. Quite likely both people would wait until it hit the bargain bin and get it for $5.
So the claim is probably as retarded as it first appears.
What's a used downloadable game worth?
Supercheap guys wait til the game goes on sale on Steam for under $5. Screw the high price of used games.
Yeah. I said it. Fuck off. Let me repeat something I've said multiple times already: You are not entitled to my money. You sold it once, you got paid what you asked for; now shut the fuck up. Think that copy is worth more? Then ask for more when you sell it. Think you're not getting your fair share? Who the hell are you to determine what your fair share is? This isn't a free market that you're after, that's nothing but "Give me money because I said so" highway robbery.
At least the cat's out of the bag now. The problem that creative types (music, film, software) have with piracy has actually nothing to do with whether something illegal is taking place around the fruit of their sweat and blood. It has everything to do with them feeling that they're not making as much money as they think they could. It's a pure money-grab, nothing else. The only difference between the people who complain that the second-hand market is ruining them and basic robbery is that the first group hires government agents to do their bidding. The second group has at least the decency to do their own dirty work.
To that, I say Fuck You. Don't like it? Fuck you, with a chainsaw.
Peter Molyneux, I have great respect for you. You created Populous, which by itself gives you a near eternal free pass to be a dick. But any interest I have in Fable III will now be satisfied by buying it second hand. I might even write you an email, showing you my original copy, the second hand sticker on it, and a big middle-finger across it. Yeah, I know, you didn't offer up these sentiments. That was one of your underlings. Then get your underlings under control. The same goes for every other entitled asshole who feels that just because they made something pretty, they deserve to be paid in perpetuity anytime someone looks at their work, or creates something that vaguely resembles it.
And just in case anyone missed my point: Fuck you. I'm going to the flea-market.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A used copy can only exist if someone has already bought a new copy and then chosen to sell it on. The supply of such copies very shortly after a new game is released is likely to have a very close relationship to how poor and overhyped that game is...
Very few people are going to buy a game for $70 by choice and then sell it for a fraction of the price a day later. If someone does that, then they were effectively tricked into making that purchase in the first place.
If anything, the purchaser should have a window in which they can return the game for a full refund, especially if they bought something which didn't live up to its advertising.
Retailers should be able to resell used copies of games as soon as they have used copies to sell, to place an arbitrary delay hurts end users and hurts retailers.
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Especially when physical media dies out! I wonder if people sell Steam accounts..
Its against the Steam Subscriber Agreement. "You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account."
I bet Ford and GM feel the same way. Perhaps they should stick something in the contract when you buy a car that requires you to destroy it when your done with it and to never sell it second hand to anyone. Then they should install software in the vehicle that allows them to remotely disable it if someone other than you trys to drive it. And if you think this comparison is ridiculous, let me assure you that I've seen purchases for software in the corporate environment that BY FAR exceed the value of any car you could buy and had these very restrictions on it.
This has nothing to do with the First Sale Doctrine, and it is not really an issue of being able to trade your used copy. First off, we have to see what the guy actually said in the article:
"But, as I say, second-hand sales cost us more in the long-run than piracy these days."
The reason second hand sales cost them more is not obvious unless you give it some thought. One reason is that pirates are very unlikely to had bought a legitimate copy either way, they never saw enough value in the product to pay for it. The guy that buys a used copy, though, did see the value to open his wallet. So, although you can't say that a pirated copy was a lost sale, you may be able to say that about second hand copies.
I would had liked to see the full transcript of that interview, too. For some reason I was not able to find any mention to that specific topic from within the printed interview itself (ponder what else was left out.) As a developer, personally, I have my own view on the topic and it's obviously biased towards a developer standpoint, but I also buy games and have my own view as a consumer stand point (unlike many suits that just sell the games and only care to make the money.)
As both, a consumer and a developer I have a grudge with chains like GameStop. Specially with hot anticipated games, they make sure to barely buy enough copies to fulfill pre-orders, even knowing there will be people interested to buy new copies weeks to come. They then litterally harass customers to buy the used copy they just drastically underpaid buying back from the customers that either did not like the game that much or cant afford to buy more games without selling back their games as soon as they beat the last one they bought.
Over the years, and dating back all the way to my days as a student, I have witnessed many convinced to buy used copies for just 2 or 3 dollars less than the new one. These consumers are convinced that they are unlikely to find a copy anywhere due to the "hot nature" of the title they want and that they can not only have it now by getting the used one, but also get away with paying 2 bucks less. At the end of the day these people may walk home with games lacking cases, thorn pages in manuals (if one is included) or disks and cases full of stickers that forever will remind you of how you or your mother got ripped off.
This is only the way the buyer of used games can get shafted. The ones that traded the games in may had it worse. The prices they pay for these games in trade in are horribly low and would never beat you selling the game yourself in eBay or Amazon.
So we have 3 victims, and one common cause: GameStop/EB.
*They actually put extra effort to avoid helping publishers even by accident.
*They attempt to buy the same products back at unfairly low price.
*Finally they harass consumers and do anything they can to sell them poor condition copies for pennies in savings.
I buy used games once in a while, and when I do I do so from either eBay or Amazon (and sometimes from friends first hand.) I nearly always end up with a far superior copy of the game, and I know the original buyer gets a better deal. At the same time, I know that the sources did not go out of their way to shaft either party or hurt the publisher that spent millions developing the games I love to play.
From a plain developer standpoint, I can see any developer annoyed at GameStop for their practices and I doubt any developer (not talking about publishers) very likely is specifically referring to those practices when they criticize the used game market.
The worse part is that many developers end up feeling they must either go fully digital or offer growing chunks of the game as "one time digital download bonuses" that a buyer of the used copy will be forced to pay for (potentially making used copy purchase too expensive to be worth it) or making many of these games useless years from now when the services are down.
As a side not in that line, i
Funny you should bring up Steam in this discussion, since Steam is a blatant attempt, at least in part, to forever destroy the secondary game sales market. You can't transfer games from one account to another, and if you try to sell the account, and Valve catches you, they just ban the account forever and NO ONE ever plays those copies of the game again.
There was a story awhile back about Valve catching someone, and banning their account, which had something like $2000 worth of games on it.Flush. Watch it swirl down the drain.
Oh, it's worse than that. The person who downloaded it might have decided that the game was really good, and might then decide to actually buy a new copy. It's safe to say that someone who buys a used copy will not buy a new copy.
So yes, used sales are a lot worse than piracy from pretty much every perspective except one: there are a limited number of used copies of a title, whereas the number of pirated copies is unbounded. To that end, piracy has the potential to be more harmful than used sales when the number of people who pirate a piece of software who would otherwise have bought it exceeds the number of people who buy it used. In practice, this means that used sales are worse than piracy across the board.
That doesn't mean that used sales are bad, mind you. Then again, in some cases, neither is piracy, but only when "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" is more than just an excuse for being a cheapskate.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I guess I fall into the super cheap crowd these days. I've payed the high price of games (SC2, CIV5 and Portal 2 being the most recent) for many years and very few have been worth the price. I finally kicked my MMO habit a several months ago I have been buying a backlog of games that are 3-4 years old for $5 each as they pop up on Steam. I think I like my new game purchasing model. I doubt I will pay more than $100 a year for games going forward and will probably never play through half of the ones I do buy.
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
True, but EB/Gamestop have huge incentives to bring new games back for trade value. When The Godfather was released, there actually was a promotion that if you could beat the game within a certain period of time (I think it was either a few days or a week), you'd trade it back in and it was 'free'. Nowadays, they have their "Most Wanted" lists, with new releases fetching the biggest bounties, and new releases tend to have a "trade 3 and it's free" promotion as well. In other words, EB/Gamestop have put HUGE amounts of effort into making people part with new releases in order to get other games, in a rather turnstile fashion. If you've ever been into an EB or Gamestop, you'll probably notice that there actually are a surprising number of new releases with used stickers on.
It's true that on day 0, there shouldn't be many used copies, but I have witnessed it, in particular with Halo 3. Within less than a week's time, used copies lined the shelves for $5 less than new.
I don't believe that it's fair for a product to have to compete with itself on the same shelves that it's on. Recently used copies are very likely to not have any damage or defects, and EB/Gamestop warrant them as working for a certain period of time, anyway, so there isn't any incentive to pay the extra to buy a full retail copy. This is part of the reason why multiplayer is becoming such a huge cornerstone of game development - Multiplayer communities generally mean that people who play online will continue to do so, rather than trading the game in. It's also why EA and others have been bundling one-use DLC with their games, and why it could very well be possible that in order to combat both piracy and used game sales, one-use (or limited-use) serial keys for console games might be in our future. With that in mind, it would be a LOT better to come to an agreement with publishers over street dates rather than having the bottom taken out from under the entire used game industry in the name of anti-piracy (which is exactly how it would be spun).
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
You're talking about this story: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/03/steam-user-violates-subscriber-agreement-loses-1800-in-games.ars
In which case Valve refunded the account. Regardless, this is the future whether you like it or not. You won't be buying physical media in the very near future. The 360 and PS3 may well be the last consoles to even have removable storage of any kind -- if not, the next generation will be the last.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
what features?
matchmaking is about the only thing better in sc2 worth mentioning and you are comparing games created 12 years apart (good matchmaking was present in wc3 already). Sc1 was pretty much the state of the rts art when it came out. With SC1 you could play on any of 4 available gateways (now regions 60bucks a pop) plus there was lan allowing you to create ad-hoc lan parties anywhere.
And you must be joking about the quality of sc1 story. Maybe it was not a literary nobel prize material but it's leaps and bounds above the sc2 level - it had memorable characters, superior dialogues and a lot of stuff was going on in the universe. Sc2 is a disaster story-wise - it is highly illogical, inconsistent and it pissed all over the lore established in sc1. Also out of 26 missions maybe 10 push story forward in a meaningful way, the rest is a filler doing nothing more but inflating the number of missions to justify 60 bucks, not to mention that many missions are just remade custom map modes from sc/wc3 times. Granted, mechanics are superior but again, 12 years passed and there are different standards now.
Go away until you can understand context and meaning in casual conversation. You KNEW what he meant but you decided to be obtuse anyways. Why?
Good-bye
Assuming you watched them at all, did you also wait until all of the "Lord of the Rings" movies were available for one low price? After all, they wanted you to go to the movies 3 times, or buy 3 movies, even though they were all part of one story!
Your point doesn't take into account if 1/3 of the story is just as much entertainment as a full story of some other game.
Not a Starcraft 2 fanboy, I played Starcraft but have since moved to consoles.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.