I'm probably more salty than Doug is, though we have both shitbinned all the consoles next gen, many 'NO CONSOLE FUTURE' replies were seen during E3.
hoshigami is awesome and i'll brook no dissent
playing this on the ol' PSOne+LCD screen back in the day was magic.
Places like Target only stock the newest of the new, so while you might hypothetically find Company of Heroes 2 in a store, the likelihood of also finding the first in the series, or even a more recent release from the same company like Dawn of War II, drops off precipitously.
You can find copies of year old games at Target. Unless they were complete bombs, they will still be there. I can buy PSVita launch games at mine still, and you know how many people actually bought physical Vita games. I'm talking about the 2-6 month timeframe anyway, where aggressive cutting of used game prices and wide availability eats into the ability to sell games for even significant discounts (e.g. see what Ubisoft has to do to move new copies of AC3 six months after it came out, for example, and they still get undercut by used sales).
Ideally we'd be in a place like Steam where there is a known tier of prices:
- initial buy-in price , comes with tons of preorder stuff that isn't necessarily just weapon reskins and the wub wub wub soundtrack in 128kbps MP3s. For example , free giftable games.
- One month discounted price.
- Three months in, deeply discounted price (1/2 of original retail)
- Six months in - 2/3 off or so
- Six months + = $5-$10 or a preorder bonus.
Note that console retail does kind of follow this up through three months in, and it is after that where the whole thing breaks down from used game pressure.
This may be a separate point, but I don't think it is the job of the consumer to support failing business models.
The thing is that the model doesn't really fail the companies. THQ got pasted because they couldn't keep up with the modern AAA market, and EA has had problems because of really awful management decisions not really related to the AAA business model. The other players have been fine with the AAA model. The huge marketing budgets that exist specifically to frontload sales and not escape gravity's pull of used game resales are the AAA business' model response to used games. Please note that those marketing expenditures literally do nothing for you as a gamer.
The real question is whether or not the AAA model works, its whether or not it serves your gaming interests. At least from our tastes on the show, it really hasn't.