GameStop isn't screwing me over. I got 32.60 back on Skyrim and they were having a big sale on PS2 games. I was able to get a hard to find RPG for less than half of what it usually goes for. GameStop has been very good to me.CkretAznMan said:
Obsidian Hopes "Digital Distribution Stabs the Used Game Market in the Heart"
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
Well, it would sure as hell get ME to buy digital if the game was 45 bucks that way rather than 60 at the store. But yeah, "passing the savings on to you" might be a bit much to hope for.omicron1 said:
Edit: On the subject of used games, I do have to agree with those who say they never let go of a good game. If I play your game all the way through, and I enjoy it to any degree, I will keep it forever and it will never see the shelf in a used games store. I have, lemme count... 83 games that I can easily find in my apartment (Wow. That is a kind of staggering amount of money, seeing as I'm not counting my Steam games...). I bought them all new, and I will keep them forever just in case I want to play them again.
Well, until I die and my loved ones hawk my collection, anyway. At that point you're on your own, but I think you can handle that if you even still care in fifty years.
To some degree, you do have to consider every used game on the shelf a game that the original buyer didn't like all that much. Perhaps your marketing campaign appealed to him more than your product, perhaps the game was broken, perhaps it was just too difficult to him, whatever... a customer paid you full price for the game and was not satisfied. In leiu of asking the game developers for a refund, he used the used games market to recoup some of his cost and pass it along to someone who might like it better.
So make me a great game, video games industry, and I will keep it off the market. Hell, make me a decent game and I'll keep it off the market for you. However, the idea that I should hold on to a game that just turned me off from the moment I popped it in the console, to keep your bottom line up, seems a little selfish unless you're gonna start offering refunds for total flops.
I do have another idea, now that I think of it... why not start offering a deposit on used games? Developers, offer to buy them back YOURSELVES for 5 bucks a pop or whatever it takes to beat Gamestop, accepting them when they are mailed back to you in sort of a "Cash for Gold" model. That way, you may have to pay a lot of gamers some of their money back (and it'd be a bit of a logistical nightmare, granted), but you'll keep the used games off the shelves and be able to sell a new copy to the guy who would have bought my used one. Making a profit of whatever you actually get from a game sale minus five bucks.
You could re-release the ones in good condition years later, as a "Nostalgia Edition" off your website. Some old titles are really expensive on eBay, or so I'm told... you could do well if your game has lasting appeal. Or you could just recycle the disks and cases to make the physical new games, not sure which makes more sense... but either way giving people an incentive is bound to work out better for you than hitting our noses with a newspaper and telling us we're bad.
Used sales will a thing of the past when the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft roll out. Games will be tied to a single user account, as it is for PC now. You mark my words.
Companies have every right to protect their profits in any legal way, and that is what companies will do. The executives do it to keep their companies growing, because if they don't increase profits every year they will lose market value and disappear. This is capitalism, this is the market, it sucks and it is unfair, but you know what princess? Life is unfair.
I'd like to see Obsidian self publish some small games, maybe even an Alpha Protocol game if they own the IP. Proper post release support for their games would be nice wouldn't it KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol.
Companies have every right to protect their profits in any legal way, and that is what companies will do. The executives do it to keep their companies growing, because if they don't increase profits every year they will lose market value and disappear. This is capitalism, this is the market, it sucks and it is unfair, but you know what princess? Life is unfair.
I'd like to see Obsidian self publish some small games, maybe even an Alpha Protocol game if they own the IP. Proper post release support for their games would be nice wouldn't it KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol.
I actually heard that Sega owns the Alpha Protocol IP, which they've said they don't want to continue with due to lackluster sales.octafish said:
Once in a while there's grumblings from authors or music artists (most famously, Garth Brooks in the mid-90s), but they're usually dismissed. (DVDs/Blu-rays are a bit different, as the film & TV studios see those as a secondary market--theatrical releases and TV broadcast respectively have higher priority in their eyes.)teqrevisited said:
But as someone on these very forums explained to me (and I'm sorry I've forgotten your name), second-hand books, CDs and DVDs are usually not sold by the same retailers who sell the brand new product side-by-side with the used titles for $5-10 less. If you walked into Barnes & Noble, WHSmith, Chapters or other large book chain, and there were used copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sitting on the shelf next to the new copies for $5 less, absolutely J.K. Rowling and her publishers would have pitched a fit.
I feel like there are too many variables that separate the different mediums to make this argument. Games are placed in a unique situation where a large team and a large budget need to be funded entirely by home sale market. With these attributes in mind, let's consider the other forms of entertainment you mentioned. For the sake of focus, piracy will be left out of this, because the argument deals with legal methods of obtaining the media.teqrevisited said:
1) Film. The average blockbuster has the similar costs to that of today's AAA game industry, what with requiring large crews for filming, editing and such, as well as requiring a large budget to fund it all. However, films have a unique method of making revenue on a piece in that theaters are given first access to them. For the first 2-3 months of the film's release, there is no threat of lost revenue from legitimate means, since (aside from the ticket), the audience receives nothing tangible for their purchase, and therefore cannot resell it to others. In a perfect, law-abiding world, this means that if a consumer wishes to see the movie, they must purchase a ticket, of which guarantees the studio some form of intake for their efforts.
Now, for many films that debut in theaters, their success is usually determined by ticket sales from the box office. If the revenue pulled in during the film's theatrical release doesn't cover the budget, it is deemed a failure before it even reaches the home market. DVD sales may help recover losses, but the studio is usually more concerned with the next investment they have to make, and so used disc sales tend to take a backseat.
2) TV. Television shows are funded almost entirely from the ad revenue received by the network they're shown on, with their success hanging upon how many viewers were present to witness said advertisements. Most shows require a decent amount of initial success in order for the network to even consider placing them in boxed sets, and only the very popular will begin to ship them out before the show even ends. It's an additional inlet for the network to receive money on their investment, but it is by no means their primary bread winner, which is why they may care less about the used market.
3)Books. This is the medium that shares the format by which the money is made, but with one key difference: budget. For most books, the work is written by 1-3 authors, who then ship it off to a publisher to have it edited and prepped for printing and distribution. A single publisher deals with this process for dozens upon dozens of different works every month (with the bigger publishers churning out thousands each year), and usually request for the author to pay something up front as a sort of a guarantee. The publisher does not have to cover expenses for the author during production, and only spends money after the property itself is complete. What the publisher may not make in actual sales can be made up in the sheer volume of titles they market, with the most popular funding a good deal of the duds.
As I read into the issue with books, however, it seems that book publishers are, in fact, complaining as much as game publishers. Take, for example, college textbooks. Everyone hates paying for them new, as the price is incredibly high; thus, many resort to purchasing these books used, a system which works fairly well due to the lifespan of these textbooks. Publishers, however, never see a cent between these private sales, which is why they must first charge such a high price, and consistently print new editions (so as to nullify editions found in the used market). This is also why many publishers are looking to digital distribution (sound familiar?) as a new method of curbing both the used market and printing costs (which happen to be a significant portion of the cost for the publisher, as opposed to the gaming publisher spending most of the budget on the developers themselves).
Now, for many films that debut in theaters, their success is usually determined by ticket sales from the box office. If the revenue pulled in during the film's theatrical release doesn't cover the budget, it is deemed a failure before it even reaches the home market. DVD sales may help recover losses, but the studio is usually more concerned with the next investment they have to make, and so used disc sales tend to take a backseat.
2) TV. Television shows are funded almost entirely from the ad revenue received by the network they're shown on, with their success hanging upon how many viewers were present to witness said advertisements. Most shows require a decent amount of initial success in order for the network to even consider placing them in boxed sets, and only the very popular will begin to ship them out before the show even ends. It's an additional inlet for the network to receive money on their investment, but it is by no means their primary bread winner, which is why they may care less about the used market.
3)Books. This is the medium that shares the format by which the money is made, but with one key difference: budget. For most books, the work is written by 1-3 authors, who then ship it off to a publisher to have it edited and prepped for printing and distribution. A single publisher deals with this process for dozens upon dozens of different works every month (with the bigger publishers churning out thousands each year), and usually request for the author to pay something up front as a sort of a guarantee. The publisher does not have to cover expenses for the author during production, and only spends money after the property itself is complete. What the publisher may not make in actual sales can be made up in the sheer volume of titles they market, with the most popular funding a good deal of the duds.
As I read into the issue with books, however, it seems that book publishers are, in fact, complaining as much as game publishers. Take, for example, college textbooks. Everyone hates paying for them new, as the price is incredibly high; thus, many resort to purchasing these books used, a system which works fairly well due to the lifespan of these textbooks. Publishers, however, never see a cent between these private sales, which is why they must first charge such a high price, and consistently print new editions (so as to nullify editions found in the used market). This is also why many publishers are looking to digital distribution (sound familiar?) as a new method of curbing both the used market and printing costs (which happen to be a significant portion of the cost for the publisher, as opposed to the gaming publisher spending most of the budget on the developers themselves).
TL,DR: Other media outlets don't have the same dependence on the home market for keeping development budgets fed that game companies do.
I know the question you posed was fairly rhetorical, but something fired me up to think this through.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, my friend. But yeah. Because it didn't sell well, they decided they didn't want to do more with it.octafish said:
Very nicely put, did you just write that? It's making me reconsider my "they're all bastards" stance on textbook publishers.shado_temple said:
so, I spend $40 on a new game that has an amazing 8 hours of single player campaign and boring multi.
What do I do?
I resell that crap and promise myself that I'll never buy anything from that developer again.
Honestly, people don't resell good games. Obsidian should work on making good game instead of QQing.
What do I do?
I resell that crap and promise myself that I'll never buy anything from that developer again.
Honestly, people don't resell good games. Obsidian should work on making good game instead of QQing.
hey make some games that are fun play with out crashing every 3hrs or less "new vegas i am looking at you", don't hold out on dlc and think of those who have a FU**** bandwidth cap, then we can talk. I love how game publishers hate this model but tell me?? How else am I going to re-buy old games for the ps2, saturn, dreamcast, or games from companies like nisa if they go out of print before I can make a purchase? "not a huge fan of drm if there is option around it with collectors editions sorry" I just love how they think they are losing huge profit when mf3 just reached the billion dollar mark... on offense to activision i will be buying that pre-owned, think the meet their bottom line.
Yeah, I was just trying to make connections between the different markets, looked up a few articles, and wrote what came to mind. Regarding the textbook segment: stepping into their shoes allows it make a bit of sense, though that whole "vicious cycle" can come into play (they raise price to cover used losses, more people buy used to counter high prices, and so on).Grey Carter said:
Some more numbers for you.
Assuming expenses for video game development/shipping is 50 million dollars (not unreasonable for a PC, PS3 or X360).
At 27 dollars a game purchase from a retailer, that is a required 1.85 million new copies sold.
With digital distribution, at a %70/30 split ($42 per purchase before taxes)), that's 1.2 million copies required to be sold.
Every game that's sold that is used, that's $27-$42 (before it's taxes) that a publisher isn't making towards paying for it's games.
If they dropped the cost to $45 with a 3rd-party DD, it would make them $31.5 per game, requiring about 1.59 million copies sold.
If it was their own DD (EA's origin for example), if it was $45 per game, it would make them $45 minus the piddling bandwidth cost. Requiring 1.11 million copies sold or so.
Honestly, it's difficult to make the money back, even with a 1st-part digital distribution service. Take these numbers what you will, but a million copies is a LOT for any game that isn't going to be a big hit.
Edit: Thought I'd throw this in, I don't mind individual people selling used games, I do have a problem with a company selling it beside the new games(Gamestop/EBGames). If someone wants to set up a used games store, I'm not with it %100, as it does take a lot away from the developer if the game is still being shipped. However, I realize it's probably the easiest way to get games for old consoles that are extremely difficult to get these days. Honestly, I don't have a problem with that, those games aren't being shipped anymore, and having a centralized location to purchase them isn't a bad thing. Of course, I also don't have a problem with people pirating those games either- some of them can be damn difficult to find.
Assuming expenses for video game development/shipping is 50 million dollars (not unreasonable for a PC, PS3 or X360).
At 27 dollars a game purchase from a retailer, that is a required 1.85 million new copies sold.
With digital distribution, at a %70/30 split ($42 per purchase before taxes)), that's 1.2 million copies required to be sold.
Every game that's sold that is used, that's $27-$42 (before it's taxes) that a publisher isn't making towards paying for it's games.
If they dropped the cost to $45 with a 3rd-party DD, it would make them $31.5 per game, requiring about 1.59 million copies sold.
If it was their own DD (EA's origin for example), if it was $45 per game, it would make them $45 minus the piddling bandwidth cost. Requiring 1.11 million copies sold or so.
Honestly, it's difficult to make the money back, even with a 1st-part digital distribution service. Take these numbers what you will, but a million copies is a LOT for any game that isn't going to be a big hit.
Edit: Thought I'd throw this in, I don't mind individual people selling used games, I do have a problem with a company selling it beside the new games(Gamestop/EBGames). If someone wants to set up a used games store, I'm not with it %100, as it does take a lot away from the developer if the game is still being shipped. However, I realize it's probably the easiest way to get games for old consoles that are extremely difficult to get these days. Honestly, I don't have a problem with that, those games aren't being shipped anymore, and having a centralized location to purchase them isn't a bad thing. Of course, I also don't have a problem with people pirating those games either- some of them can be damn difficult to find.