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The secondhand market for games stifles creativity!

M

Matlock

Banned
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1689109,00.html

The secondhand or "pre-sold" games sector is booming, with trade magazine MCV putting its value at more than £100m a year - still a drop in the ocean compared to last year's £1.3bn UK market announced last week by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (Elspa), for full-priced titles. But in light of recently reduced revenue forecasts from Take 2, Electronic Arts and Activision, it can't be ignored any longer. The extent of the problem was not hard to find in shops such as Computer Exchange in Tottenham Court Road in London.

"I don't buy new games any more," one customer said. "What's the point? Within two weeks they'll be £20 less, and you can trade in your old stuff at the same time."

Another customer at nearby Games Focus agreed, suggesting that publishers may have brought the problem on themselves in their drift towards the more casual mainstream of console games.

"Games are so easy now, they're not worth the money" he said. "The old PC role-playing games and adventures used to last me weeks. Now I can rarely find them and can finish a shoot-'em-up in five days - who wants to play them again?"
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Lots of good points here--games have gotten easier and shorter, prices have crashed...and the secondhand market is booming...making more "safe" productions necessary instead of anything majorly new or innovative...

And before anyone even tries flying the logic across the board that people selling/trading games for cash will lead to more game sales...no. Just no. Don't even.
 
N-N-N-Nintendo YEAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH


bbrockon1no8if.gif



NINTENNNNNNNNDOOOOOO
 
I try to go for clearance sales to get some cheap deals. Its not as bad as used game sales, but the developer wont get all the money they need from it. Plus they're now raising the cost of full-priced games! Thats not good..
 
Okay fine then, enact legistlation that will make it illegal for me to sell me games to another citizen. Fucking try it. :)
 
Matlock said:
Lots of good points here--games have gotten easier and shorter, prices have crashed...and the secondhand market is booming...making more "safe" productions necessary instead of anything majorly new or innovative...
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Nah, the problem is they're not making compelling games worth holding on to, let alone pay full price for. The argument for making more of the same is laughable, especially if they're complaining about their current sales. Believe me. I read GAF.
 
To developers who are whining about this; FUCK YOU.

And Sony, with your idea about making it so PS3 games can only play on their owners system (I can't remember the link to the story); Double FUCK YOU.
 
Shinoobi said:
Nah, the problem is they're not making compelling games worth holding on to, let alone pay full price for.
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Yea, exactly.

Meanwhile, games are still getting most of their lifetime sales in the first few months of release.
 
If the publishers en masse cut the price of games to about $20, I doubt I'd ever by a secondhand game again, unless I could only get it that way. At the same time, people who go "How much for one game? Fuck that" will look at gaming again and find it far more accessible. The market grows until, like the movie industry, pretty much anyone can afford to be a gamer as so many games are sold that the smaller profits on each one add up to larger profits than they got selling them for so much.

Or we could just jack up the prices and turn even more people off/towards secondhand games. Genius!
 
AdmiralViscen said:
Yea, exactly.

Meanwhile, games are still getting most of their lifetime sales in the first few months of release.
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- With the major exception of Nintendo, which has absolutely frightening catalog sales, month after month, and still manages to be the darling of the used-game market as well. And they are also the major innovators at this time. Coincidence?

Oh boy, listen to me. I almost lost it.
 
Shinoobi said:
Nah, the problem is they're not making compelling games worth holding on to, let alone pay full price for. The argument for making more of the same is laughable, especially if they're complaining about their current sales. Believe me. I read GAF.
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I think you're right. When I look in the used sections I see the same games over and over again, but I never see games like Paper Mario for sale.
 
It's been said, but why don't publishers stop complaining about their customers and just focus on making games that are great and selling them at a price that will float in the market.
 
BocoDragon said:
Okay fine then, enact legistlation that will make it illegal for me to sell me games to another citizen. Fucking try it. :)
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Downloads and DRM say HI! Try selling your copy of Geometry Wars on to someone else. :lol
 
And Sony, with your idea about making it so PS3 games can only play on their owners system (I can't remember the link to the story); Double FUCK YOU.
Click to expand...

Hasn't this been disproven?

Okay fine then, enact legistlation that will make it illegal for me to sell me games to another citizen. Fucking try it.
Click to expand...

They tried that with CDs, as I remember Garth Brooks was all over it, but even the RIAA fell flat on their faces with that one.
 
bumpkin said:
To developers who are whining about this; FUCK YOU.

And Sony, with your idea about making it so PS3 games can only play on their owners system (I can't remember the link to the story); Double FUCK YOU.
Click to expand...

Sony came out and said that every PS3 game will be able to play on any PS3 out there.
 
Mama Smurf said:
If the publishers en masse cut the price of games to about $20, I doubt I'd ever by a secondhand game again, unless I could only get it that way. At the same time, people who go "How much for one game? Fuck that" will look at gaming again and find it far more accessible. The market grows until, like the movie industry, pretty much anyone can afford to be a gamer as so many games are sold that the smaller profits on each one add up to larger profits than they got selling them for so much.

Or we could just jack up the prices and turn even more people off/towards secondhand games. Genius!
Click to expand...

At $20, that would make used games $5 or $10. You'd pay the $20 when you could get it used for $5?

Maybe, morally, you would, but I bet 90% of the people would pay the $5 instead.
 
If used games were being resold for 5 dollars, people would be trading them in for 2 dollars. No one would trade in a 20 dollar game for 2 dollars.
 
Matlock said:
games have gotten easier and shorter
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They have? Relative to what?

And before anyone even tries flying the logic across the board that people selling/trading games for cash will lead to more game sales...no. Just no. Don't even.
Click to expand...
Just the other day I walked in to EB Games to trade in a few games, figuring I'd have enough to cover purchase of one new game, turns out they were running some sort of game trade-in deal that practically doubled the trade-in value I received so I went and purchased a second brand new game with the surplus. FACT.
 
kaching said:
Just the other day I walked in to EB Games to trade in a few games, figuring I'd have enough to cover purchase of one new game, turns out they were running some sort of game trade-in deal that practically doubled the trade-in value I received so I went and purchased a second brand new game with the surplus. FACT.
Click to expand...

How many games did you trade in? 3? 4? Because that means there are going to be 3 or 4 people in the next few weeks who are going to buy one of the games you traded in, rather than a new copy of those games. Net loss for the industry: 1-2 games.
 
Make good games and I'll gladly pay full price for them, in the first week of release. I've done it with plenty of games this year, where I haven't regretted it at all - Ridge Racer 6, Resi 4, GT4, Animal Crossing etc


Ever been in a games shop and seen what is actually traded in? 90% of it is annual update shite like Fifa, Madden etc or the casual, "rushed-to-market-and-full-of-game-crippling-bugs" crap like Driv3r. Make good games that people actually want to play more than once (and won't finish in a day) and they won't trade it in. Simple, right?

Most people only trade in shit games because they realise they made a mistake in buying it, so they want to trade it in for something else. I've seen lots of people trade in two/three shit games to get something good on release day (yesterday I saw someone trade in Fifa RTWC 06 and Madden 06 to get Ridge Racer 6)
 
Cheaper games, shorter games. That's the solution. The attention span of gamers has gone way down since the days of the "old PC role-playing games" that lasted weeks, since the age demographic has skewed upwards.
 
That's the price of taking gaming into the mainstream. The majority of the market is made up of casual gamers and graphics whores. Casual gamers don't buy anything they've never of, anything that's not based off of a movie lisence, or anything without a significant amount of eye candy. Graphics whores refuse to play anything but games with the highest caliber of eye candy.

Devs have to cater to these two parties if they want to stay in business. This leads to expensive games based off of proven concepts(GTA, MGS, GT, Zelda, Half-life clones) where the main focus is pushing graphical splendor pass the bar rather than gameplay. Some of these games come out good, but a lot of them don't. They could have been good, but because they're developed on a deadline, a lot of things are left out in the rush to release.


Things won't change until the casuals/graphics whores get bored in their never-ending search of better eye candy. Until then, expect games as well as consoles to get more expensive.
 
AdmiralViscen said:
If used games were being resold for 5 dollars, people would be trading them in for 2 dollars. No one would trade in a 20 dollar game for 2 dollars.
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$5 used games are usually worth a couple of cents at trade-in, if that. And if you paid $60 for your copy of Wrestlemania 2000, but you were unfortunate enough to still have it in 2005... tough luck, buddy. EB and Gamestop won't even take it any longer.
 
AdmiralViscen said:
wtf?
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I understand your confusion. It's like we just got on a rocket ship to the moon and Socrates was there, but he absolutely refused to share his wisdom. So instead we decided to wing it and copy furiously from the textbook of life.
 
Himuro said:
What games are you people playing? Just fps's I bet....or something.

If anything, most of the games I play these games last me longer, and take a longer amount of time to beat. I spent 30 hours with JSRF and there's still replay incentive. I played DMC3 when I got it for 2 months straight. Nothing but DMC3. I clocked 60 + hours. Shadow of the Colossus, while short, has the replay value of a classic SNES/Genesis game. I can replay it over and over, and I'm sure I'll be doing so for years to come. Time attack mode <3 MGS3 took me 30 hours and if it wasn't for subsistence coming out, I WOULD replay. Katamari Damacy, while being short has plenty of replay incentive. GTAIII? I've replayed that game 5 times from front to back and I'm not bored yet, and that game can be pretty long if you want it to be. So on and so forth.

So really, what the fuck games are you people playing? People who say Nintendo is the only innovator in the industry as of now are cock monkeys and are taking retard pills.

As for used games, I only buy a game used that I wasn't interested in at the time or I passed for another game. If the gaming industry spread it's releases around the year, they wouldn't have so many people buying used games. For every game I buy new, there's 3-4 more games I passed up on because they came out at the same time.
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You listed 6 AAA gaf approved games released over the course of the generation, how many of those do we get a year? I think people in this thread are talking about the hundreds of other games that get released a year, are mediocre in quality, bomb, fill up the shelves with used and clearanced copies, and the publishers are now complaining about.
 
Another customer at nearby Games Focus agreed, suggesting that publishers may have brought the problem on themselves in their drift towards the more casual mainstream of console games.

If that little bitch hasn't played games like DMC3 or NGB he needs to shut the fuck up, shut.the.fuck....up!
 
I find all this interesting as I dont deal with used market at all. I just dont see the appeal of someone else's used junk(they never treat game as I do most of time). More interesting to me is how fast a new game get discounted/considered a bomb nowadays.

Add gamefaqs, I dont think a game will ever truely be challenging ever again. Weither they admit to it or not I'm sure 70 percent of gamers use that site or buy a book for every game they try. "I'll use it too see what I missed if anything", turns into looking every time you get stuck for more 5mins. Way too much handholding nowadays.
Im sure that falls under free speech or something too, I doubt a publisher has even bothered to ask GF to delay faqs few months, like if it would totally destory fun of adventure/puzzle like game.
 
Blah, blah blah... I've read this crap before and let me tell ya 1 thing: People trade games in to buy new games. Simple. How can this hurt the games industry or its creativity?
 
Gamestop/Ebgames don't sell used PC games, do they? Come to think of it, outside of online sales, I can't find any place that sells used PC games. Why is that?
 
biggreenmachine said:
Blah, blah blah... I've read this crap before and let me tell ya 1 thing: People trade games in to buy new games. Simple. How can this hurt the games industry or its creativity?
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Because every single game you trade in to get your new game, is going to be purchased by someone else, in lieu of a new game of their own. This has already been explained in this topic:

AdmiralViscen said:
How many games did you trade in? 3? 4? Because that means there are going to be 3 or 4 people in the next few weeks who are going to buy one of the games you traded in, rather than a new copy of those games. Net loss for the industry: 1-2 games.
Click to expand...
 
AdmiralViscen said:
Because every single game you trade in to get your new game, is going to be purchased by someone else, in lieu of a new game of their own. This has already been explained in this topic:
Click to expand...

Ya right, you obviosuly dont shop at the stores i shop at. All 3 of my local EBgames typically have the same old crap used selection ever week, I wish the second hand selection turned over as fast as the new releases.
You think that if I trade in 3 old gamecube games for say,the newest Zelda game, that those 3 old GC trade ins will sell before 3 more copies of the new Zelda game do? Kids especially can use trade ins to get more games when their parents are spent out. It brings more revenue into the game industry. The mark up on new games is pretty narrow and these stores use trade in to keep in the red and keep new stock on the shelves.
Plus, and this is a big one, it's the only way to get all the disconinued / out of print games, which is another driving factor to get customers like me to constanly visit the store . I don't always need to go to EBgames to see what "new" games are out. Sometimes I'm hoping to find an old gem, and if not I see what else is new.
Old trade ins = more new titles being sold.
 
Himuro said:
Oh, well then I guess I misinterprated.
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I agree with you though. I'm swamped with good games, and like most people on here, my backlog is huge. If you can't find innovation and fun you just aren't looking. On the other hand though, I haven't played anything that I've enjoyed the same as playing the best games of last gen. To me its almost like the quality of the industry as a whole has risen tremendously, but the polish, quality of the gameplay, and overall effort into the best games has dropped.
 
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