Slashdot Mirror
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 buy ONLY used games for my XBox 360.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
How is a broken retail model related to terrorism? I don't see the connection. And I have RTFA.... still says nothing.
-- (this is a sig) My Computer Programming Forumhttp://www.programers.co.nr/
The real secret for cutting down on reselling used games (can't eliminate it entirely) is to provide an incentive for the customer to retain it. New content, re-playability, tie in with future products that open new avenues of gameplay, rewards for brand loyalty, etc. You make a nice single player franchise, have there be some sort of in-game reward for owning other products, having played them, or even still having the original disc and manual.
Oh, and don't shit in your own sandbox when you go werewolf on the series - destroying everything and everyone just because you want it to be 'though provoking' when it all comes crashing down (looking at you Bioware / EA...).
You continue to make another Call of Duty / Battlefield clone with a crappy five hours of single player action to make a quick buck - your game will get resold to Gamestop, that's just a fact. Multiplayer 'passes' prevent resell of a multiplayer game, but it won't do donkey dick to prevent those who are tired of owning your product from selling it off. Just accept that this will happen if you make shitty games.
If Mr. Browne has ever purchased a used car, borrowed a book, DVD, or CD, then he is a hypocritical schmuck.
If that is true why isn't MW3 cheaper in Steam?
'prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells
Did anyone else?
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
The game developers calling for a share of used market profits are advocating the death of First Sale doctrine in the name of perpetuating a doomed business model.
Maybe I should RTFA more often.
The used market has flourished since time immemorial, probably more so in the past than now. It isn't responsible for the lack of creativity in games. Blame the state of the industry, dominated by risk-adverse mega-corporations like EA that take over or muscle out the plucky independent game studios that used to characterize the industry.
What I really loath about the special pleading of the 'content industries' is not so much its frequent-though-not-total dishonesty; but it's sheer lack of perspective.
Is it, quite possibly, the case that used game sales are bad for aspects of the game creation business. However, the right of first sale is a fairly fundamental aspect of people actually being able to 'own' things. Guess what, guys: Even if your direst predictions are true, this is a case of video games vs. meaningful property rights. A sense of scale would be in order.
The same thing goes for assorted other 'IP' issues. Is piracy hurtful to the music and video industries? Quite possibly(though history suggests that their estimates of how much so should be taken with a grain of salt that would stun an ox...); but can that possibly matter more than such minor quibbles as 'due process' and 'innocence until proven guilty', which are trampled on by most of today's more enthusiastic anti-piracy schemes? Even if it were true that the whole damn industry would burn without such legislation, what of it?
That is what really gets to me. Yes, it is also true that these industries have a history of mendacity about the real damage inflicted by various things that they don't like; but that is a petty footnote: When it comes right down to it, the thing that they don't like(used game sales) is derived directly from a right more important than the entire video game industry. GameStop can rot in hell, they are a thoroughly parasitic and inefficient middleman; but meaningful ownership of property is far more important than video games, even if the direst predictions of their self-interested proponents are taken at face value.
He produced the Frontier games, didn't he? My experience of those was:
Frontier: copy protection so bad that you had about a 25% chance of being able to start the game until you removed it.
First Encouters: required a patch to run at all, then crashed. I think I played about an hour before I gave up.
So I doubt he has to worry about anyone wanting to buy a used copy of either.
There are people out there willing to pay millions of dollars in aggregate for single player games that don't even exist yet, and pre-owned games are killing the market for single player?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And create games that are so good that no one bothers to trade them in. Also, we have a right to resell our property. Deal with it.
The used market softens the ridiculous price of games when they come out. If Joe buys a game for $60, and resells it for $10, , he can use those $10 to buy another game. If reselling used games becomes impossible, then Joe might be short $10 the next time he tries to buy a new game, and will not be able to afford it. He could just wait until it's on sale.
The one place where the game industry loses is because of the friction of the used market: The cut that the intermediaries take. If they want to make that friction go away, why not allow reselling of games, right within their platforms? Why not lower prices to spur sales at full price. I sure have not bought a game for $60 in many years.
And then there's also the model followed by this guy called Gabe Newell. The best ROI his company ever got did not come from extremely expensive games that people can't resell. It came from making a game free to play, and instead of making people pay to get advantages in game, he just got his Australian sidekick to sell digital hats. Since people loved the game, they also bought the hats for Gabe's free game.
But it's easier to blame piracy, or used games, or the Wicked Witch of the West than it is to build a very solid product first and figure out how to get paid later.
Are you selling us an object that we own, or are you asking us to pay you for convenient access to a system that you own?
You can't have it both ways.
The thing is that these games retail for a huge price, usually $60 now for PC. That's too much. But the price does not go down very fast except in brick-and-mortar stores where there is incentive to push old product off the shelves. Online prices do not go down as fast and publishers can maintain their inflated idea of a game's worth. Print, stamp, wrap, ship and stock a boxed PC game and there's a lot of overhead, so then why are online games selling for exactly the same price as a store bought game? If you've got cost reduction you need to pass along some of that to the customers. (a coworker made this point earlier how some people naively assume that higher margins means higher revenue, whereas you can make much more money by reducing margins if that increases sales)
I guess me and Amazon are killling the games industry together by paying 15GBP for a game after 6 months to a year instead of 40GBP right away. PS to game developers (looking hard at Bethesda) don't release very buggy software if you want repeat customers.
Nope. In the 90's, a $60 game was unheard of, and $50 games were very rare. $40 games were the top tier, and $30 games were the norm. $20 was my price point. I remember these prices because that's when I stopped buying due to DRM. Now I replay all my old games that still work without server authentication and limited installs. Of course, Richard Browne thinks I'm not worthy since I want to play any game for longer than his company says I should be able, thus I wouldn't buy every new game they made. Sure, they would make a profit off me, but not the amount they want, so they'd rather go scorched earth and alienate their sometimes-customers.
They're lower than ever!
I'm confused. How does "lower than ever" equate to "not high"? If a single game cost $1,000 in 1990, and then they dropped down to $500 over the years, would that mean they're not expensive simply because they're lower in price than they ever were?
I know one thing: they're too expensive for me to waste my money on them. Especially when these game developers and companies are treating me, the customer, like absolute shit. DRM, locked down consoles, attacks on used game sales... no thanks.
Completely wrong. Used items should be illegal. For instance, used cars should be banned; everyone should instead buy brand-new cars, keep them for 2-3 years, then drive them straight to the junkyard to be crushed, and go buy a new car. There's no reason to think all present car owners can't afford that. Used car sales are bad for the market.
[/sarcasm in case it wasn't obvious]
Other than for steam sales, Origin sales, Gamersgate, and GoG sales where they see massive spikes in unit turnover. They're willing to let that happen (and, admittedly, with Steam they just sort of do it, and if that means you now get 59 cents per copy of your game sold rather than 3.50 well tough shit for you, and if steam didn't you they were doing this sale, so they ran out of keys and delisted your game, well, tough shit for you, even if you get them new keys in two hours they may not relist your game for weeks, tough shit for you). Publishers are quite agreeable to significant reductions in sales prices generally, as long as they know they can actually sell at that price.
Retail is a whole other problem because you really can't do retail for much less than 30 bucks a copy, you're losing to much to fixed costs and distribution at anything less than that. Unlike movies where publishers are happy to print a million discs for something that will barely sell 50k units, and if it doesn't sell they can repurpose the jewel cases (the expensive part) for another title with a game the box and manual are game specific and you can't afford to eat 40k in inventory that doesn't sell let alone a million units in inventory. Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now? That'd be why.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all. Unfortunately this starts 1 day after release, whereas we wouldn't mind so much if this happened day 21 or preferably day 90. Whether or not people would pay 30 bucks for your game when one was available used for 25, versus 60/55 is hard to say, but it used to be that gamestop was *the* place to have your game, have launch agreements etc. Now it's downright toxic, and you only do business with them because they're still about 25% of gaming retail. If you could could make money without ever giving them a box and only selling through a digital distribution service you will, because gamestop isn't in this to make games, they're in this to fuck you and take your money. Customer or supplier. EA has gone so far as to build their own store because they figure (probably correctly) that in the long run they'll be better off without gamestop, who were ~25 of their total business, and without losing 30% to steam and just distribute through their own store, than to have to deal with both of those hassles.
The PSN and XBL are slightly different animals, because you may have to pay them to push out patches or the like. That makes part of the pricing a matter of guessing just how much money this will cost you if you need to patch it vs how many copies will sell, and for example the Wii U won't give you a cut of sales until you hit 6k copies (which can be tough for an indie dev).
The first major iteration on how to deal with this has been DLC. Which ranges from 5 dollar horse armour to full blown expansions that you download for cash. With DLC the publisher and developer definitely get something, so it can that the only money you make on your game is from a 10 dollar DLC, and the 40-50 dollar release basically just puts the DLC store in the hands of players. Which is a sad way to think about your lovingly crafted game. The next step has been full on online distribution channels (steam, origin, gamersgate, GoG, direct2drive, impulse - now owned by gamestop etc.).
And yes, both the mentioned steam scenario and the thousands of copies in a warehouse happened to companies I worked with recently. Well the thousands of retail copies not that recently, that was 4 or so years ago. Printing all of those copies what a significant chunk of the total development budget (~15%), and they ended up in a warehouse, where, as far as I know they still are.
Publishers aren't stupid. Well, ok, they are. But not entirely as stupid as we portray them to be. They aren't going to commit to lowering prices when they don't know what the licencing fees will be (which by the way, m
Here in the real world
What is the "real world"? Would it suddenly become a fake world if nothing was done?
I don't know what you're talking about, but doing nothing is very much an option.
The stores are the problem
They're simply selling used games. I have no intention of ever agreeing with you if you're saying they should be punished for that. Even if the entire game industry goes under (it won't), I have no intention of restricting the right to resell games.
instead of the gaming industry
You mean instead of the people that have a problem with well-established rights? Reminds me of the entertainment industry demanding that other companies (like Google and ISPs) protect their IP for them. Pure arrogance.
Compare these two hypothetical situations
Even their cohorts in Hollywood allow movie theaters to have a second run of movies after they are getting stale with lower ticket prices. The used to be $1 theaters, but now they're probably closer to $3. Basically, in the world of media and media related products. The older something is, the less you can get from it. These really are depreciating assets. If you don't want GameStop to profit by selling a used copy of your game for $5 less than new price, cut the damn new price. Used game prices are a much better reflection of the true market value of these games. The publishers have unrealistic ideas of their games market values.
Car manufacturer Richard Browne has come out swinging in favor of the rumored remote disable features in the next years model PlayStation Orbis and Xbox Durango.
'The real cost of used cars is the damage that is being wrought on the creativity and variety of cars available to the consumer,' Browne writes. Browne's comments echo those of influential engineer and Raspberry Pi designer David Braben, who wrote last month that '...pre-owned has really killed commuter cars. It's killing daily driver cars 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 used car dealers (a thoroughly reasonable life choice) with the supposed evils of the used car market. Braben goes so far as to claim that used cars are actually responsible for high car prices and that 'prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells.' Amazingly, no car manufacturers have stepped forward to publicly pledge themselves to lower car prices in exchange for a cut of used car sales. Car companies are hammering dealers (and recruiting insurance companies to do the same) because it's easier than admitting that the current system is fundamentally broken."
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.
END COMMUNICATION
Sarcasm aside, I'm sure that the auto industry would do that if they had the power.
Surely they're not that stupid. The whole reason cars sell as well as they do is because people are able to "trade up" to a newer model every few years, and the reason they're able to do that affordably is because they're able to resell their 3+ year old vehicle on the used market for a significant fraction of its new price. If they couldn't do that, they'd buy cheaper cars, and they'd keep them for much longer. Middle class people aren't going to buy a $50k luxury car if they're stuck with it for 25 years or have to junk it when they get tired of it; they don't usually have that much money available anyway, and are able to afford it because they've traded in their previous car for for $10-20k (plus the financing).
Unfortunately for the content industry, modern technology basically gives an analogue to Star Trek replicators. Any media can be copied for no cost except for the bandwidth and electricity needed.
Actually, it's even worse than replicators. It's probably safe to assume that the amount of energy needed for replicators would be quite high (and much higher if they transmuted elements, but still a lot just to rearrange molecules). The amount of energy needed for copying digital media is puny, and constantly shrinking. You could rig a generator to an exercise bike and power today's low-power computers. I imagine the exertion needed to power a smartphone would be quite small, and those can store tens of gigabytes of media now.
But yes, basically the media companies now exist in a post-scarcity market, and are trying to act like they're still in a market where scarcity exists. It's not going to turn out well for them.
While you're at it you can pledge to buy your clothes at thrift stores and eat out of dumpsters.
I *DO* buy many of my everyday clothes (obviously not underwear or other such personal clothing items, or "dress" clothes like suits/ties) at thrift/second-hand stores, and I take what would go in that dumpster (my organic garbage) and compost it and use it to grow food.
As an extra, I also collect spent brass casings and shells and reload them for my firearms. I don't hear ammo makers whining over "lost sales". They make money selling reloading supplies & equipment. Maybe the game companies should take a look at that business model.
I also never buy new games.
What was your point, again?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Avid Old School Bioware fan here. I have BG1, BG2, KOTOR, NWN(all expansions).
I stopped buying when they started with DLC to devalue used products, or try to force you to buy early, or get locked out of DLC. No coincidence this was after EA purchased Bioware.
I perceive this as attacking the customer. If you attack me, you are never getting another dime from me again.
I haven't purchased DLC/DRMd/Server locked game, and I never will.
I haven't bought a new game since 2005. I expect I won't again, except maybe $1 to $5 apps, since I consider that a free price for a rental.
But I will never pay $50-$60 to a locked down game. If the keys to play are elsewhere, that is a rental, that could be revoked at corporate whim.
Get 'em right here.
Oh yeah, there's music there too. Have I said enough to get Slashdot shut down for linking, and armed men in black uniforms sent to my house to terrorize me? No? Well, how about a few more links:
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now?
Good, less paper to take up space. You can also advertise this as "saving the trees". A digital manual does not take up much space, it usually fits on the same disc as the game - great. If only hardware manufacturers did that ... though I think they do, other than a quick setup guide (which you may need to read before the computer is operational enough to read a pdf) the rest of the manual is on the driver disc. TV/audio equipment still comes with full manuals - instead the manuals should be on a CD, so they take up less space and can be found more easily (I would copy all of them to one CD or just keep on a hard drive - that way I could find the manual quickly and not need to keep it near the device).
I haven't seen game in boxes locally too, just the disc in a DVD case, pretty much like movies. I have no problem with that - less paper to take up space or throw out.
Yes, and it's not like people read manuals anyway. Though you're wrong on the advertising. No one, not customers, not distributors care, in the slightest. But the removal of manuals was precipitated by costs (having to print and ship manual costs a lot of money for what is today no value). But collectors editions still have manuals or art books or the like because those customers want them.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all.
I bought used monitors, tape decks, servers, UPSs and other equipment because of the price (and some devices are not made anymore). The manufacturers are for the most part still in business. If your games is so short that it can be finished quickly and has no replay value or is just bad, then of course people will want to sell it. I can return broken equipment (or even if it works as intended, but for some reason I do not like it, as long as I decide than in 14 days) for a full refund. Can I return a game? Oh, right, I can't. If your game is good then people will play it instead of reselling it immediately.
Maybe this is why used games are so popular - no returns. When I buy a used device, I cannot return it, even the warranty given is a few days, useful only if the device stops working when I bring it home. When I buy a new device, I get 1-5 year warranty and the ability to return it for any reason in 14 days. Games are sold without warranty (and without even the promise that it will work, even if the game disc was blank, I couldn't do anything) and no way to return them (and most games are bad), so the "new" has no advantage over "used". Of course, I could pirate the game, see if it is any good then buy it, but by pirating it I make the developer lose at least a billion dollars, so me buying the game afterward will still result in almost $1G loss.
I buy games on steam for up to 10EUR. Anything more expensive and I just wait for the price to drop or a Christmas sale or whatever. If the game is bad, well, I lost 10EUR, a bit much, but survivable. OTOH, if I want to buy some device that is more expensive, I study it really carefully - read reviews, get the user manual to find out if it has all the features I assume it does (I once bought a VCR that cannot output the tape trough the RF port, while it wasn't a deal breaker, it is an annoyance) and sometimes may even download the service manual to see if something is as I assume it to be (and nothing is written in the user manual) - older devices are easier, since the schematic is easier to trace to find out. This may take me a few days to choose between various options or to see if a particular device is useful to me.
Yes, exactly, but when you buy for 10 euro 7 euro goes to the publisher, which means 3.5 goes to me. (hence my 3.5 dollar example....). When gamestop resells, I get nothing. When they resell 10x over I get nothing x10. I migh
The funny thing is, not only are they $60-70, they honestly aren't of the quality that some $20-30 "indy" companies like Nippon Ichi or XSeed put out, to say nothing about true indy games out there.
The interesting thing is that I suspect that if you adjusted the cost of a 1986 NES game for inflation, you would end up at modern game prices. I don't recall hearing people complain too much about the cost of carts back when I was a kid. People who where 14 and wanted the top 10 games just got a paper route and bought them. I agree that the quality of many triple A titles is very much lacking these days, and I think that is the real problem. I have no problem paying $100 for a video game that provides me with 100+ hours of entertainment, and that is the problem with a lot of games. Price is no guarantee of quality, unfortunately.
I have a theory that the 8 and 16 bit games era was the golden age of video game design, because the hardware resources were so limited. They had to design the hell out of games to make them work and fit in the systems of the time, and I will speculate that they spent a lot more time thinking carefully about core mechanics and fun. I can fire up a compiler nowadays and have my computer rendering 60+fps on a 10k poly count model in about an hour. That doesn't mean that the resulting game will be well designed, though.
The light at the end of the tunnel is that the market will find its level, and wherever we end up there will be games. On the way though, there will be some companies that are eaten by a grue.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!