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EDGE: A dev view on preowned: why game players must support their hobby

Flaws in AAA business is your problem not mine. If you don't like it make something else.

You say games need to be cheaper? Then make cheaper games. Some developers seem to be doing A-okay transitioning to smaller, digital games.

Too often publishers withold the funds from the developer, case in point Fallout New Vegas. Over some ludicrous metacritic score. Business side of things is corrupt as hell, not my problem. I would be perfectly happy if we go back to single-A games.
Another method of making games without an end is equally disliked by many consumers: DLC.
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This is such bullshit, consumers have no problem with DLC. It's about how you do it. Bethesda and Gearbox got it right, a lot of other developers got it wrong.
 
So how about charging $60 for brand new, boxed games and $40-50 for digital copies (that can't be traded)? That would give people an incentive to buy it digitally and therefore not trade it in.
 
MJLord said:
I'd agree with you if movies just tried to make back their money in film tickets. They also have tons of merchendise, dvds and so on.
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What you're saying, then, is that the movie industry has successfully diversified its revenue streams, while the game industry hasn't.

Again, that's simple financial incompetence. Lower budget game developers on other platforms are doing just fine. This tells me that it is perfectly possible to create a sustainable business model in the game industry, just not the one these AAA companies have chosen.

So there are many publishers using different approaches to game design that are doing fine on "non-AAA" platforms. If these AAA developers refuse to adjust and insist on continuing to make these AAA games -- and can't make money in the process -- my response to that is the same response any company gets when they make bad decisions: goodbye.
 
blackprophesy said:
Don't a lot of people that buy new and sell, then use the money they get back to funds their next purchase?

So, Person A and B buy Game 1 new; nobody buys Game 2 because they can't sell Game 1
Or, Person A buys Game 1 and 2 new, and person B buys Game 1 and 2 used.

Either way it's 2 new game sales. Removing the ability to sell after using something is going to mean less purchases from that person buying new.

If you bought a car and couldn't sell it, could you afford another one? Different scale but same principal.
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This is true. A population has set purchasing power. No more, no less. You can't create money expenditure for a form of entertainment that doesn't exist. The cycling of money from new, to selling it in, to buying new - to selling it again - exists.

The video game industry seems to think the circle has a leak in it - that leak being used game sales. What they need to realize is that it's not a true leak, a good percentage of that "leak" funnels back into the publisher - > retailer -> consumer circle.

The industry would probably be more profitable if there were no used game sales and they went purely digital. But not as much as they'd like you to believe. They are using a 1:1 concept trying to equate that each used game sale is one less new game sale. It doesn't work like that. In a similar fashion if somebody said PC game X was downloaded one million times on a bittorrent website, thus one million sales were lost.

It's a very complicated equation, that really nobody can nail down.
 
DaBuddaDa said:
Let's continue to bury our heads in the sand and keep ignoring the fact that a massive amount of trade in money goes towards the further purchasing of new games.
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Pachter mentioned that according to his numbers, we're talking a 5-10% loss of revenue due to the used market.

5-10%
 
Sell me the Game DIRECTLY then, let me buy the game Direct from your studio, and then Let me sell it back to you if it SUCKS, or is a 4 hour story.
 
Folks, every time you go out and have a nice dinner instead of buying a new game you're hurting game developers. That's money that should have gone to a poor artist.

Why do you hate gaming?
 
I always buy console games "new", just not at launch and then sell them and put that money towards buying more "new" games. If I couldn't do that then I couldn't support my hobby.
 
MJLord said:
Make it more appealing to buy your games digitally, then you can move into an online only store later on in the generation then bam! No more used games. Xbone missed steps one and two.
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Yeah, I don't even see the point of buying digitally if it costs the same as a physical copy, yet comes with none of the benefits of having a physical copy.

The industry would be better off as a whole would be better off if they actually stop pricing everything at $60 already. People wouldn't need to trade their old stuff in just to cover the $60 to even buy new games in the first place.
 
People saying "Make games cheaper" can't think that would change things. People would just buy the $20 used copy instead of the $30 new copy.
 
I do love AAA games.

But with Unity, there are fucking talented indie teams out there who can make things similar to AAA quality, without the huge fucking budget. Without publishing middle-men. Without worrying about conventional marketing. Without worrying about physical distribution.

I will just say, I never buy second hand, and I never trade in, becuase I want to support the industry. That's my prerogative.

But it is not our role to support the industry. And that suggestion is ludicrous. We as consumers have choice and if your $60 game is not a good enough value proposition, we should not have to bail out your bad business decisions

AAA is fucking coughing and panting up a steep, steep hill. And I reckon by the end of this generation, it will not exist in the same capacity.
 
Curufinwe said:
Some of them are. Zynga's social games aren't really flourishing anymore.
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Absolutely, I don't mean that any segment of the market is simply a license to print easy money.

A healthy market is one where some companies succeed and others fail. Social gaming is a healthy market. The AAA market segment is not healthy because virtually everyone is failing.
 
Too many publishers are too stupid to realize their huge AAA games costs way too much to produce. When they're all trying to create AAA games that cost so much that they require sales upwards of 4million copies sold to profit then there's a huge problem. If every movie studio was trying to make only blockbuster movies aiming for that $1billion worldwide mark then it would be a fucken disaster too.
 
Someone really should do a study on the subject of "Most money selling used games go towards buying new titles vs. money spent on used games/money spent on new games".


I am 100% sure that most money coming from used games is from cheap ass games.
 
sikkinixx said:
People saying "Make games cheaper" can't think that would change things. People would just buy the $20 used copy instead of the $30 new copy.
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Not if they made the digital versions that price. Digital cuts out the retailer (so more for pubs/devs) and becomes more affordable for a lot of people. You can't trade in or buy used digital.
 
Zaventem said:
I agree with him. I remember when i went to buy Mass Effect 2 and they were already selling used copies for $5 off the $60 dollar price. You don't have to do buy the new game, you could have saved 5 dollars but it helps the developers you love if you do decide to pick it up.
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Are people really buying that game for 55 instead of 60 or are they stacking stuff like 10% off used with an edge card and things like that? I have personally never bought a game used that was 5 bucks under the normal price. That seems absurd. Now if a new game was 60 and I could get it for 40 used, that's a different story.

If its really just a five dollar difference that is causing the developers to go belly up (which is bullshit) then start adding bonus items in the game for new copies, not just for pre orders. Put an item or items in the game that make the 5 dollar difference worth it.

I still feel like bloated budgets as bad management are the reason the industry is in trouble.

The reason the Xbox one stuff was such a stupid idea is because they wanted us to give up consumer rights in exchange for no real benefit. Start doing steam style sales on everything and people would jump to digital and eleminate used games, but there has to be something given in exchange for that. No one is going to drop 60 bucks on something they can't sell back, especially when the disc copy is the same price as the digital copy.
 
VariantX said:
Yeah, I don't even see the point of buying digitally if it costs the same as a physical copy, yet comes with none of the benefits of having a physical copy.

The industry would be better off as a whole would be better off if they actually stop pricing everything at $60 already. People wouldn't need to trade their old stuff in just to cover the $60 to even buy new games in the first place.
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Or give early adopters some of the DLC that you're bringing out with it? Just SOMETHING to make it more appealing. It's not a hard concept but it's been ignored by MS in their store and I can't speak for Sony.
 
ultron87 said:
He is absolutely right. If you want there to be more games of a variety you enjoy you should buy those games new.

However, that doesn't make someone buying used a bad person or make used games something that should be killed.
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There was more variety when the gaming industry wasn't trying to ape Hollywood.

They choose to live by a formula, they'll die by it.
 
Here’s a pretty unavoidable truth for consumers: when someone buys a used car, that transaction does not support the artists, designers, engineers, assembly line workers, or anyone who created that car. 100 per cent of the money paid for a used car goes to the people they just handed their money to.
 
Opiate said:
Absolutely, I don't mean that any segment of the market is simply a license to print easy money.

A healthy market is one where some companies succeed and others fail. Social gaming is a healthy market. The AAA market segment is not healthy because virtually everyone is failing.
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I thought Sony, MS, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft and Activision were doing pretty well with their AAA games.
 
What I agree with about this dev is that people should know where their money is going, simply so they can make informed decisions. However, if a consumer doesn't give two shits about directly supporting the developer, that's their perogative.
 
cchum said:
Here’s a pretty unavoidable truth for consumers: when someone buys a used car, that transaction does not support the artists, designers, engineers, assembly line workers, or anyone who created that car. 100 per cent of the money paid for a used car goes to the people they just handed their money to.
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That's a false equivalent, it's been explained why this is not the case many times before. Go look it up.
 
cchum said:
Here’s a pretty unavoidable truth for consumers: when someone buys a used car, that transaction does not support the artists, designers, engineers, assembly line workers, or anyone who created that car. 100 per cent of the money paid for a used car goes to the people they just handed their money to.
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This!

to be fair though a used car is worse then new.

A used game is exactly the same as a new copy.

I agree with you though. Its not our fault that the medium works that way.
 
Bitmap Frogs said:
Pachter mentioned that according to his numbers, we're talking a 5-10% loss of revenue due to the used market.

5-10%
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I don't think it's so simple to boil it down that way. Yes most money does go back into the game store (credit instead of cash). But there is a subset of consumers that trades in used games for used games constantly recycling. Probably playing releases 3-6 months behind launch.
JetBlackPanda said:
A used game is exactly the same as a new copy.
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Nope. Used game has wear and tear too. Manuals ripped, boxes chewed by dogs, scratched discs all happened to me in the past.

edit. Great post Stump. <3
 
Curufinwe said:
I thought Sony, MS, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft and Activision were doing pretty well with their AAA games.
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Nintendo doesn't fit the AAA mantra. While their games are of high quality, they're about the gameplay and not about that "movie" feeling.

Edit : and didn't AAA gaming almost break EA? If it wasn't for their sports line, they would have gone belly up by now.
 
Here’s a pretty unavoidable truth for consumers: when someone buys a used game, that transaction does not support the artists, designers, programmers, musicians, or anyone who created that game. 100 per cent of the money paid for a used game goes to the people they just handed their money to.
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So what. You got your cut when that copy of the game was initially sold. Why do you think you deserve double or even triple dips?
 
People don't have infinite amount of money, unless they're able to buy new games at the price of used, they will continue to buy used games.

Stuff like steam sales helps though.
 
Fularu said:
Nintendo doesn't fit the AAA mantra. While their games are of high quality, they're about the gameplay and not about that "movie" feeling.

Edit : and didn't AAA gaming almost break EA? If it wasn't for their sports line, they would have gone belly up by now.
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I'm using AAA to mean the amount of money spent or production/marketing, so Bethesda and WB are other companies who have done very well with games like Dishonored, Skyrim and Batman.

Madden and FIFA are AAA games. It's not their fault EA spent to much money on a subcription MMO.
 
I used to buy a lot of games day one when I could walk into a supermarket and pay £29.99

Now they are £39.99 I don't. Even though it's only a tenner it's made me ALOT more cautious of buying games.

At £29.99 I was more prepared to take a gamble and only if it was that bad I would trade it in. Now I buy Hardly any games at all.
 
Stumpokapow said:
Developers and publishers do not offer a system for users to be compensated when they buy a bad or unfinished game or even simply a good game that they don't like. Developers and publishers, while they enjoy interacting with their fans, do not make counter-intuitive economic decisions in order to "support their fans". Developers and publishers do not offer retailers much in the way of margin on the end product. Developers and publishers rarely fix technical issues in no longer commercially active catalogue titles.

Businesses cannot conduct themselves through a veil of strict rationality and profit maximization and then expect customers to conduct themselves in a limbic, emotionally-driven, sympathetic way.

Individual staff members cannot defend poor corporate practices by saying "I work for a corporation, not my place to make those calls" and then when their business fails, say "It's not just a corporation, think of the human cost". The second you dismiss being able to do more because "it's not your place", you should realize that you're employing the exact same logic that people employ when they deny you charity when you're in need. The two are tied together. If businesses ran themselves in a more humanistic, human-focused way with an emphasis on mutual enrichment of customers and employees and long-term stability, rather than serving investors, customers would respond in a more emotional way.
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Wonderfully succinct, yet comprehensive. I couldn't have said it anywhere near this well. Thank you.
 
Opiate said:
I'll repeat this point because I feel it's important.

The AAA games industry right now is the equivalent of a film industry which produces films that cost 1 Billion+ to make.

Movies which are that expensive would cause significant losses (on average) to the movie studios, because very few films in history could possibly recoup that investment. But wait! If movie studios got repayed for every DVD resale, for every rental, and for every pirated copy, it's possible movies that expensive could be made and could flourish.

But movie studios don't get that money. Instead of charging on ahead anyway, they make 50-250M dollar movies instead. Similarly, it is clearly already possible to make very popular games which are cheaper to develop, as games like Farmville, Nintendogs, Minecraft, and League of Legends attest to. If the Playstation and Xbox ecosystems make it difficult to have low budget hits like this (and they do), then abandon those platforms and find places which allow you to succeed more cheaply.

Finally, if a developer feels they cannot transition to iOS/Android/PC/3DS/whatever and feels "stuck" in the big budget Playstation/Xbox environment, then I don't know what to tell them other than that this is how companies that make bad decisions die.
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cannot be emphasized enough.
 
Averon said:
So what. You got your cut when that copy of the game was initially sold. Why do you think you deserve double or even triple dips?
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It's ridiculous that devs are actually saying they can't survive on new game sales alone. They need repeated cuts from each used sale to profit. In addition they have to nickle and dime content in the game to sell as dlc.
 
Curufinwe said:
I thought Sony, MS, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft and Activision were doing pretty well with their AAA games.
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Er, Sony, MS, EA, and Ubisoft have taken massive, massive blows over the course of this generation.

Nintendo beats a different drum than the 'standard' AAA model, but yes, they're a success.

Activision is pretty much the only AAA company that continued to draw steady profit over the seventh generation.
 
I agree that used sales can hurt the industry, but it's the only consumer protection we have. Companies don't put out demos because they know it could hurt sales. They use day one review embargoes to drive up preorder sales. Games media won't break an embargo to wan people off a horrible game. Just take the latest aliens game as an example. So the only people looking out for gamers are other gamers. We should be allowed to sell amongs ourselves. If the industry wants us to stop, then stop trying to scam us.
 
Can Crusher said:
Oh like movies, music, books, etc?

Fuck off. That argument is so weak, yet it keeps coming up.
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Movies release in the theaters first, Blu-ray sales are a second revenue stream and one which has a longer tail because games are hampered by technology, people want the latest and greatest graphics, older games don't interest the majority of people as much as older movies do.

Musicians get money from playing live and both studios and musicians get royalties from radio and TV airplay. Extra revenue streams.

Books are more similar but used books suffer from wear and tear. While discs can scratch but as long as it can be read there is no degradation in the quality of the experience.
 
Stumpokapow said:
Developers and publishers do not offer a system for users to be compensated when they buy a bad or unfinished game or even simply a good game that they don't like. Developers and publishers, while they enjoy interacting with their fans, do not make counter-intuitive economic decisions in order to "support their fans". Developers and publishers do not offer retailers much in the way of margin on the end product. Developers and publishers rarely fix technical issues in no longer commercially active catalogue titles.

Businesses cannot conduct themselves through a veil of strict rationality and profit maximization and then expect customers to conduct themselves in a limbic, emotionally-driven, sympathetic way.

Individual staff members cannot defend poor corporate practices by saying "I work for a corporation, not my place to make those calls" and then when their business fails, say "It's not just a corporation, think of the human cost". The second you dismiss being able to do more because "it's not your place", you should realize that you're employing the exact same logic that people employ when they deny you charity when you're in need. The two are tied together. If businesses ran themselves in a more humanistic, human-focused way with an emphasis on mutual enrichment of customers and employees and long-term stability, rather than serving investors, customers would respond in a more emotional way.
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Flawless victory.
 
if you don't want people to loan, trade, or sell back their discs, stop making disc-based games

i don't get what's hard about this
 
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