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If You Resell Your Used Games, the Terrorists Win
MojoKid writes "Game designer Richard Browne has come out swinging in favor of the rumored antipiracy features in the next-gen PlayStation Orbis and Xbox Durango. 'The real cost of used games is the damage that is being wrought on the creativity and variety of games available to the consumer,' Browne writes. Browne's comments echo those of influential programmer and Raspberry Pi developer David Braben, who wrote last month that '...pre-owned has really killed core games. It's killing single player games in particular, because they will get pre-owned, and it means your day one sales are it, making them super high risk.' Both Browne and Braben conflate hating GameStop (a thoroughly reasonable life choice) with the supposed evils of the used games market. Braben goes so far as to claim that used games are actually responsible for high game prices and that 'prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells.' Amazingly, no game publishers have stepped forward to publicly pledge themselves to lower game prices in exchange for a cut of used game sales. Publishers are hammering Gamestop (and recruiting developers to do the same) because it's easier than admitting that the current system is fundamentally broken."
I almost never buy used games PS3 games, but I almost always wait until a game is part of the "Greatest Hits" collection. That way I'm reasonably certain it's a good game. I'm too cheap to pay full price.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The reason to upgrade the hardward generally comes down to improving graphics and processing power. The added work for things like high end physics and AI is not an especially big hit in terms of development expense though. What is driving the cost upward is primarily the high res 3d graphics.
Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen. If you increase the polygon count of your scene from 100 000 to 10 000 000, the labour requirements get difficult. Just watch the credits from a game made in 2001 and compare to a game made in 2012. The size of the art teams have gotten proportionally much larger compared to the size increase for the programmers.
Also, the assumption that the CEO's are getting hookers and blow is not universally true. If you produced one of the top 3 games of the year, sure, people are getting rich. If your outside the top 10 though, the development costs are eating enough of the profit that its a crap shoot on whether or not your broke even.
Used games and piracy have eaten a great deal of the profit margin for games that were good but not great. Lowering the price might actually be a good idea, but if your barely breaking even your going to have a hard time justifying the move to share holders who are seeing only marginal profitability.
In any case, change is coming because the iPhone / iPad is forcing it. All the companies that cannot compete at the $60 a game core market are starting to chase the lower dev costs for the mobile devices, and the bigger companies that see 'easy money' are following them. In any case, the long term move is to cut the retail outlets out of the game distribution entirely. Once that happens, your pretty much F*cked for buying used games anyway.
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