The "Used Games" Controversy - Page 2

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/hello-brave-world-console-gaming-003839870.html

Customers don't return games that are worth keeping. They return disposable junk games, used, for a credit because they were overcharged in the first place. It's funny how business owners want to let the market decide everything when there isn't a way for customers to actually set their own price.

If a company's making $1 billion instead of $2 billion, am I supposed to feel sorry for him?  The business is cyclical, you can't fuck your own customers because you don't have the stomach to ride out the turbulence.  And by "turbulence" I mean having two cars instead of three.  Instead of bitching about your own customers and changing their experience for the worse, why not try and find more innovative ways of making money?  But they're too lazy to do that.  World's smallest violin...

IT~!!!!  Sorry for IT!  Don't drink the "Corporations are people too!" juice!!!

 

They're so blinded by greed that they don't see all the ramifications of such a drastic move.

I'm not a console owner but it seems an easy prediction that people will be less willing to risk buying a new game for $60 dollars when they know they can't sell it back if it sucks (which, statistically speaking, it will).

 

Possibly people will go back to PC gaming. Which wouldn't be bad for me, but I'm betting console manufacturers wouldn't love it as much...

 

So people are going to run to PC gaming which has already been doing this for years and years?
 

 

The difference being that PC games don't generally cost $60 new, and have more regular and predictable price drops and sales. A person that isn't willing to pay $60 for a game they can't trade in may be willing to pay $10-40.

New PC games absolutely cost the same as their console counterparts.  With some titles you might get lucky and see it for $50 but most are $60.

 

The regular and predictable price drops and sales...I dunno.  I see a boatload of "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" sales on console games.  I see a lot of console games go pretty cheap a couple of weeks after release before they jump back up to full price.  With that being said, I think we have a chicken and an egg thing going on here.  Console game makers have to deal with a used game market, and would have to drop their prices in order to compete with a market they can't control.  Maybe they'd be fine with $40 for their game after a few months but there are used copies selling for $20 already.  If they can actually elminate the secondary market and control their own pricing, it makes logical sense to lower your price point to maximize sales after the initial "new game" rush has died down.  PC games do this because it's the smartest financial move.  I'm not sure why we're jumping to the conclusion that console manufacturers wouldn't do the same thing.  They're greedy, not stupid. 

PC gaming is a whole different beast.

For one, there's the indie market, which is becoming more relevant each passing day. People may feel to have greater choice, greater flexibility and price range, making the used-game point moot - to an extent. I feel this way right now. I'm just pointing out that more people may be pushed to reconsider the advantages of a PC as a gaming platform.

 

 

If by 'most' you mean 'EA and Activision's titles.' DX:HR, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Saints Row 3, Arkham City, etc. all launched for $50 on PC, $60 on consoles. LA Noire with all of the DLC released for $40 on PC (admittedly, it released much later on PC than on consoles).

 

And as for sales? Other than the DX:HR Special Edition, I haven't paid full price for a PC game in nearly three years, because I know that they're likely to come up with a ridiculous markdown in one of the five annual Steam sales, or in a Weekend Deal or something. The likelihood of that kind of markdown happening with a console game is significantly less. Yeah, buy two get one free deals crop up pretty frequently, but that works out to at most 33% off (assuming all three are the same price to begin with).

Buy 2 get 1 free amounts to $40 each on new titles.  $40 is a price that you hold up in the previous paragraph as being pretty darned great.

Yes, but if the new consoles eliminate used games, there will automatically be fewer people buying the new systems (just about the entire gamer community on the net is furious even thinking about it), so you'd have fewer people buying these new games overall.  Dropping prices is actually the worst thing a company could do...you'd actually need to INCREASE prices to make even the same amount you were making with the older systems.  These companies are crying about losing profits, but are then going to execute a plan that would decrease their profits even more?  That doesn't make sense.

 

See youd think that but the gaming community REALLY loves games.I don't know if enough of them would really give up on a shiny new toy.
 

 

I'm sure there are gamers that can't resist and gamers with lots of disposable income, but with the economy being the worst it's ever been, losing the ability to sell or trade your new game that you probably beat in less than half a day is not very attractive to most people.  It's the absolute worst time for a game company to pull a stunt like that.

I dunno, the lackluster sales of the PS3 suggest that they're not really as committed as all that. I wonder if this isn't going to be a thing like the comic market in the '90s, where companies assume more loyalty on the part of their customer base than actually exists, attempt several blatant schemes to exploit that imagined loyalty, and then crash and burn when their projections turn out to clash with actual reality...

Let's not forget that Sega and Atari went under.  Sony and Microsoft have lots of other product to keep them afloat, but their game share is not immune to crumbling.  This is a ripe opportunity for a new company to get in on the games market and keep the used game option.   Apple maybe?  iGamer?

It's decidedly less great when you have to pay $120 to get a $40 a piece price.

All my console gamer friends are pissed. I don't have a modern console, and I'm still butthurt that consoles killed AAA PC gaming.

 

I can empathize however, this kind of stuff has been happening in corporate IT (No upgrades, no ownership, can't migrate operating systems, 'software subscriptions' ) for years, and it's made me hate my job.

Triple-A gaming is alive and well on the pc. Its death, as they say, has been completely exaggerated.

Except if they are selling games via direct download then they get a larger share of profits on sales and by eliminating secondary market sales they are actually extending the sales lifespan of their games.  They wouldn't need to increase prices and they would be able to decrease prices as a game ages, and they'd still make a better profit than they are currently.

Except the small detail of the constant cost and upkeep of a half decent rig to play these games on. Kinda balances the ledger a bit overall.

 

We're a long way off systems selling games direct download en mass.  PS4 and Xbox 720 are out next year, too soon for such a huge turnover.  They will be selling physical discs for a while still.  People aren't going to buy the next gen systems if they can't get a physical copy of a game.  PS4 is probably going to be using the new 4K bluray discs, so they are definitely going to be still using physical media.
 

 

But the gaming community isn't a monolithic entity. I consider myself an OG gamer, and video games have been a part of my life since the early 80s. But for me - as I'm sure it is for a lot of gamers of my generation as we get older - video games have become decreasingly important. And the more difficult or inconvenient the manufacturers make it for me, the less likely I am to purchase their product. I also enjoy going to the movies. But if there was a guy who hit me in the nuts with a wiffle ball bat every time I walked into a theater, I'd go to less movies.

Edited by TCD - 4/3/12 at 7:50pm

So remember when we talked about game companies charging for the ending to a used game?  Well, it's a reality.

 

Only it's not just for a used game, it's for everyone who wants to see how the story shakes out, new or used.  Capcom has done it with the Asura's Wrath DLC.  They're calling it the "True Ending" to the game, saying that the one on the disc was just build up.  I'm glad I only rented that game.

 

EDIT: Link: http://kotaku.com/5897988/the-week-in-evil-dlc

RD Mental Note: Cacnel any and all plans for your chain of Wiffle Bat Cinema Multiplexes.

This is the lore, but it hasn't really been true for quite a while.  My last two gaming video cards lasted for five years each.  The last one cost $280, its much more powerful successor $250 (and the most recent one is only  replaced in the sense that I built an entirely new machine to sit next to the old one).  RAM is ridiculously cheap.  They practically give terrabyte drives away with happy meals.  It's nuts.

System requirements have also plateaued, or at least taken a gentle slope recently.  It's at least partly because of cross platform development I suppose.  But I do think that the diminishing returns of developing ever more detailed content will see graphically lower-spec games continue to become more common. Compared to the past that's a pretty high spec.

If you simply must run everything in insane-o-res on three screens, then yeah, your machine is going to have a lot of fins and exhaust pipes.  But your basic off-the-peg Dell is a rockin machine these days and will serve you well for a good while. Build it yourself and its often a lot cheaper. Shit, teenage girls with their face/netbooks bought for pocket money are carrying enough power to eat a 360 for breakfast.  PC gaming has never been cheaper.

'course, that's not all there is to tempting people away from the TV.  But the price:power ratio has changed exponentially.

 

Are publishers pushing the no-used-games things, or the console manufacturers?  Both?  Would Nintendo try and buck the trend to gin up support?

 

Quote:

 

Reduction then, I wouldn't say it was thriving?  There's Valve and Blizzard?

And everybody else. The only AAA games that don't make it to PC are published by the first parties. And Red Dead Redemption.

 

 

 

Ah, I should clarify, PC-focused titles.  I'm not saying consoles have dumbed down PC gaming, but consoles have totally dumbed down PC gaming.

 

Yeah,  but the last couple of years I've gotten the impression that the tide has turned.  Back when Microsoft got into the console game it was almost a pledge of fealty that developers publicly announce the death of PC gaming and they would join the new cause. And so they did.

It held on though, with the WoWs and Starcrafts in there.  The Half Life episodes too I guess.  I'm a bit one eyed on the subject but there seemed like a lot of things that AAA console titles just weren't going to do and they were convinced no one wanted these things anymore.  But things like the Stalker and Witcher games were pretty big hits.  The big boys scoff when something doesn't do Halo or CoD/MoH numbers, but there's an audience for that sort of thing. And, moreover, there's developers who don't want to make the next third person action, cover based script fest shooter or platformer.  There's things like Team Fortress 2 holding the banner pretty high. Then something like Minecraft comes along and makes millions before its out of alpha, doing shit no one in the industry thought anyone would care about. 

 

Skyrim really convinced me console wave had broken.  Here's a huge multi platform title, in a genre people keep announcing is dead too (idiots who are wrong, but hey) where most of its sales are on PC.  It's close, but when pressed on why most devs went multiplatform in the first place, they'd usually say the PC sales were like 18% of your typical multiplatform title and dropping.  To crack 50% (dunno the latest, but it was for a while) and simultaneously break all the records with a monster of a game like this, one that's almost resolutely old school as well, even the longest holdouts have to start looking at the worlds largest gaming platform a little differently.

 

Maybe it won't last.  The race is surely on to stop the PC gaining too much ground before the next generation.  Maybe they'll trip themselves up along the way with ever more telescreen-esque innovations.  We shall see.

Five years ago, I'd probably talk shit about the PC and stick to my consoles.  Now?  It's looking damn tempting to pick one up.  Next generation of gaming consoles looks fairly bleak, so I'm thinking about rolling through it with a Wii U/PC combo.

And please understand, everything I say re: console vs. PC gaming is coming from an old guy who is still butthurt that he's hopeless using a controller for FPS.  

 

Going over to friends houses is no fun if they want to play Call of Modern Honor 7, or whatever.  I just get brutalized.  Heaven help if they're playing Smash Brothers, that game can go to hell too.

 

I'm not against console gaming by any means, Super Mario Galaxy may be my favorite game of all time, I'm just bad at them.