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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."
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/
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 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?
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.
I borrow my games from the library. Fuck em all.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
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.
Or we can boycot the industry completely for a year. Make them feel the hurt & maybe they'll realize that they're not something important like, say, the food industry.
the only problem with that is the game publishers won't see it that way, they'll blame piracy.
The problem here is price. Again.
Most people don't have problems dropping $10-20 on a game. They do have problems with paying $60-70 for a game. It's not rocket science here.
If new games cost a third of what they were now I would suspect the used market would not be nearly as big.
They should take a hard look at themselves before whining. Honestly, if the new consoles are going to restrict used games, I won't buy one and find something else to do with my time.
And this entire line of thinking is retarded! hey why don't I get a cut of every resale of every PC I have ever built? Why I could probably lower my price if that happened (but of course IRL I'd just pocket the extra profits) or why doesn't every carpenter get a cut every time a house he built gets resold?
Because that isn't how reality works and only arrogant game designers and the MAFIAA would try to push that insane bullshit upon us. If you want to charge for MP because you need to pay the server costs? Not a problem but frankly i'd rather host my own so don't be surprised if I buy the one that lets me host instead of yours, but news flash game designers YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL and don't deserve to have the entire rules of commerce rewritten because you think everyone that views your precious IP should have to give you a cut even after you have sold it.
Just remember everyime you support douchbags like this you are siding with those like Sony that think you should have to pay a nickel to play a song or give them the price of the CD over again if you want it in a different format. Your imaginary property rights don't and shouldn't trump ACTUAL property rights. the most ironic part is while douchenozzles like this rail for more American laws they then go to china to hire cheap coders. Our laws are good enough for these dicks but not our workers. fuck them and the horse they rode in on, if they block first sale I'll pirate every damned thing rather than give a cent to pricks like this!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The problem here is price. Again.
Most people don't have problems dropping $10-20 on a game. They do have problems with paying $60-70 for a game. It's not rocket science here.
If new games cost a third of what they were now I would suspect the used market would not be nearly as big.
They should take a hard look at themselves before whining. Honestly, if the new consoles are going to restrict used games, I won't buy one and find something else to do with my time.
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.
Seriously, I get that all that HD graphics and buying hookers and yachts for your CEO and the like are very, very expensive. But the $80 a game rumored price point for the Orbis and Durango titles is insane, and honestly, 99.9% of the titles for all 3 consoles are shovel-ware dressed up with marketing blitz.
If they want to fix game sales, make better games. Fire the executives who keep making shitty decisions. Stop being so goddamned "safe" (read: bland as hell) with your companies. If Notch had been working for a major design studio, there's no way in hell Minecraft would have ever been released.
We're going to hit a point very soon where it doesn't matter how much better the graphics get, the devs won't be able to develop for those, because we're not going to be willing to pay for $80-90 games with $50 of tacked on DLC.
The funnier thing is:
Gamestop wouldn't exist without used game sales.
Over 50% of first-day sales happen at Gamestop.
By trying to kill gamestop (and defraud consumers of their rights of a purchase) they're fucking themselves over.
Agreed. While the games aren't as complex/expensive to develop, Apple's App Store is a great example of this. People are making hundreds of thousands, millions, and occasionally tens of millions off games selling for $0.99 to $4.99. When the potential market is 25M+ machines, there is the potential to sell many millions of copies, if the price is below the "take a chance" impulse buy threshold.
Indeed, the App Store (and corresponding Android markets) may completely alter the way mass market software is priced and sold.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
They're not going to blame piracy any more than they would regardless. You have to remember that they're dishonest, not stupid. They know perfectly well what they're doing, and why they're doing it: Their goal is not to reduce piracy, it's to control the market. Making noises about piracy is just their way of excusing customer-hostile behavior calculated to achieve a dominant market position and exclude competitors from the market. Higher actual piracy rates or lower sales rates are totally irrelevant, because they just fabricate all the numbers anyway.
the only problem with that is the game publishers won't see it that way, they'll blame piracy.
I declare this meme officially over.
But there is a different problem. The problem is that boycotts don't work unless you're organized, and you're not. You and six of your friends staging a boycott is not going to make anyone care. A year from now when you're discontinuing your unsuccessful boycott having failed to modify their behavior, someone else will be announcing a new boycott that only they and their six friends will be ignored for participating in.
There is, however, an easy way to deal with this: Don't buy games with DRM. Ever. Period.
That isn't a boycott, it's a promise. And it's forever.
It's also a lot easier to hold yourself to, because there are plenty of DRM-free games made by developers who don't disrespect their paying customers by assuming they're criminals. Adopting this policy is actually advantageous to you, regardless of its consequences on game developers, because you then never have to deal with the failures of DRM. And sooner or later, as more and more people discover how easy and satisfying it is to adopt and stick to a policy of never, ever buying games with DRM, the developers who use DRM will either abandon it or go out of business. Problem solved.
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]
Not for me. The hatred and fear I feel for people who try to keep me from reselling stuff I bought from them has far exceeded it. They want a future where I own nothing but merely "lease" things, for full price of course. They are public enemies and should be treated as such and stopped before this madness spreads to other industries.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
To be fair, I know a fair number of people who have been boycotting the industry since the day they discovered Kazaa...
Right or wrong, when game companies do shit like this, that is where they're driving their customer base. Why boycott when you can just rip the fucking game off and play it for free? Are people supposed to feel bad about doing that when the industry itself is treating them like they're doing it anyway? I mean, you keep calling your 12 year old daughter a whore, by the time she's 16, odds are, she's going to be a whore.
The game industry treats it's customer base like an abusive parent treats their children, and they're shocked when the kids finally have had enough and disappear? Please. Not even these masters of the universe can be that fucking naive.
So... one might say that you were boycotting DRM games.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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
I don't have a problem with paying $60-70 for a game. Have been happy to purchase at that price point for quite a few years. The problem is that brand new games here in Australia come out at $100, often up to $180 for a collectors edition, and that, I do have a problem with paying.
I also expect that a game I spend a decent amount of money on can be played by me, or my wife, or my kids. You have no idea how pissed off at Ubisoft I was when the DLC for Assassins Creed Brotherhood came out and was tied to the one xbox 360 account which initially downloaded it - my wife's account - and that I couldn't play the DLC without re-purchasing it.
... wait, what?
Nah, the real problem here, the actually truly factual problem is, 'REPLAY VALUE', most current games just don't fucken have it. Play it once, zip right through it, meh, same old same old, who the fuck want's to play it again, might as well dump it on the second hard market and get some of 'MY MONEY' back.
Want to fix the problem in the second hand market start designing better games again, games that people want to keep and replay again and again and again. Stop the PR=B$ (lies for profit) of spending more on marketing and franchise licences, than on game development, to suck people in on first day game sales buying crappy games.
This has nothing to do with game development and everything to do with the endless stream of bullshit corporate marketing. First day sales is all about marketing strategies and basically sucking people in to buy shit games that they won't ever want to play again. Of course once arsehole game publishers get into that kind of shithead thinking, game replay value becomes an anathema to them as well.
'We don't want them to play the same game over and over again. where's the profit in that, we want them to get sick of it and buy another one', so game re-playability often sucks on purpose as does length of single player games. The benefit of psychopaths in industry, nothing to do with providing customer service and everything is about how best to rip of the customer as much and as quickly as possible (a lot of this thinking was straight out of M$ and the ballmerites).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Most people don't have problems dropping $10-20 on a game. They do have problems with paying $60-70 for a game.
Most people use the term "most people" as shorthand for "me and the people I associate with."
In reality, in the USA, "most people" either have to make a hard choice to buy a $20 game or have no problem at all paying $70.
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!
You have a good point about "first day sales"...
If a game is lousy, but heavily marketed it will sell well initially, but sales will soon taper off when people realise how bad it is...
If a game is good, sales will actually increase as some people buy it, enjoy playing it and tell their friends about it, especially if the game is good enough that those people who bought it don't want to resell it so subsequent players also have to pay full price.
Basically the industry is greedy, they want to do all these customer hostile things while not suffering the consequences that doing so in a free market should entail, and when such things happen its always pirates or used game sales to blame, and never the fact that they're treating their own customers with utter contempt.
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Do 50% of first day sales need to be at Gamestop however?
To put it another way: would all those people who bought "EA's Banhammernorefunds" at Gamestop the day it came out have not gone to other retailers if Gamestop hadn't stocked it?
I wonder if the problem here isn't Gamestop or used game sales, so much as the fact we're still using the same business model from the 1970s to sell games consoles and games despite the fact the world has drastically moved on since then. There's nothing good about a system that requires high game prices to fund development and cover the disadvantages of... having high game prices.
Many Slashdotters argue that the problem is simply the high prices, and that people would not buy used games if the new games were cheaper than they are today. Is that actually realistic? If you were given the choice between a $5 used game and a $25 new game, would most people fork out $25? And would enough people spend $25 to make up for the fact that is isn't $50 any more (remember, also, that the fixed costs in each game, from the console maker's royalty to the cost of pressing a disc and the cost of manufacturing the box, means that you'd need considerably more than twice as many sales to get the same income)
The arguments here are largely going on because we've reached a point where a high tech box that you plug "games" into that you buy at high cost has become unsustainable. People who argue it's all about the used market are missing the point. The used market will always exist in such an environment. People who feel that prices are too high will never buy new games, where used games are available or not. Prices are therefore going to continue to go up.
And in the meantime, I'm sitting here paying (relatively) peanuts for games on Steam. I'm paying peanuts though, for the most part, because those games are two or three years old. I can't really judge whether the developers would be getting the money they spent on development if their new releases cost the same as their two or three year old prices.
Something's going to give, and unfortunately, it's probably not going to be prices, but the crashing down of an industry that can no longer keep up with expectations while producing a product that will sell at any price high enough to recover its costs.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.