Alade said:
Before I start, let me point out that I loathe the used game system gamestop and other retailers use for two reasons:
A) I don't have access to it and I have to pay double the usual game price where I live, and I still do it, while somebody can have the same game at a quarter the price.
B)It cuts both developer and publisher profits. This is as bad as pirating for them, worse maybe, it's legal.
Now anyways, on to the point. I disagree with gamestop's business practice but I've recently had a mini-ephiphany on why it might be justified. As most of us probably know, the future of video games is in digital retailing, either something like Steam or a new cloud system. Either way, physical copies will not be sought-after goods. I predict that physical copies of games will be sold at specialized stores (like comic stores these days).
As this is bound to happen eventually, retailers will get the shaft. This will bite a huge portion out of their profits, and let's not kid ourselves, the publishers won't care. Once digital distribution gets a hold on the Console market the way it did on the PC, it's over for gamestop (and the others), they are going bankrupt.
But the used games market is another way for them to earn a huge profit before this happens, so in a way, they are justified. I still dislike gamestop, but this is one side of the coin that I never bothered seeing before.
Well I tend to disagree with your asessement here, see the used game sales don't cut into the profits of the publishers because that resale value is part of what justifies the high price tag of games. It's become a part of the business model that someone buying a game for $50 or $60 can trade the game towards another game and recoup some of that expense. While you don't hear this pointed out by the industry much anymore, it WAS a point made in defense of high game prices the last couple of console generations.
The complaints now are based around pure greed, and bean counters trying to say that they believe without used games people would be paying full prices for the games new. This of course also overlooks that without a favorable trade in value people are less likely to want to dish out the already expensive price for the game. Sure the publisher might be supporting a title through 3 or 4 differant owners some time, but that's really no big thing when they are supposed to support that product indefinatly anyway, if one guy has the game for 10 years or so and 3-4 people have it for 10 years between them in the end there is no real differance, it's mostly just the game companies screaming for more money, since their billions are not enough to make them happy.
Also do not misunderstand that the game developers lose nothing off of this, there are rare exceptions, but in general people talk about gamers stealing from developers through things like used game sales because it garners sympathy, it just happens to be a lie.
See, the way the game industry works is that publishers typically hire developers to make a game for them. The cost of making the game, the development budget, is the money being paid to the developers which they use to pay themselves since 99% of the cost here is human resources, in the scope of these projects the cost of materials (office space & computers) is minimal. If a game costs like say 30 million dollars to make that means the developers pocketed 30 million dollars to make the game.
Once the game is done, the developers have gotten their money, it's a done deal. It's all about the publisher making money off of sales to cover what they paid the developer with anything beyond that being profit.
Understand that the guys who MAKE the games lose nothing from piracy, used game sales, or anything else, just by there being a game they already made their money. The danger to them is far less direct, in that if the publishers don't make money they won't continue to hire developers. This does not mean piracy is right or anything, simply that you need to understand who is being victimized, and also that there is a substantial differance between "losing money" and "making less money than we potentially could be".
Now there ARE exceptions to this, there are cases when a developer will have an idea for a game it feels it can sell, and rather than being hired to make money for someone, they will borrow money and effectively publish themselves. In this case they take however much money they decide to pay themselves for the development, and then hope that the product will make enough money to pay off their loan and have extra money on top of that. Even under this system the devs get paid all the millions they lived off of while they made the game. The big risk here in the worst case scenario is being unable to pay off the loan, and creditors not being willing to extend them further credit for that reason.
The distinction is important because of the way sympathy is paid off of here. A gamer is liable to feel more sympathy for the people who make the games, than the person who is simply a penny pincher and is fronting the money. The developers are rarely if ever at risk from anything related to these discussions.
In the end my personal attitude is that piracy (which is unrelated to this specific discussion, but to the overall issue) is wrong, but used game sales are fine because of how they figure into the value of the games and pricing, and also because the game sales aren't costing anyone anything, they just tend to mean that publishers make a little less money than they would like.
