Obsidian Hopes "Digital Distribution Stabs the Used Game Market in the Heart"

[Saxnot]

The value of the game is technically irrelevant. PC gaming has been growing and no one cares for "game value." PC gaming WILL survive the fall of console gaming, but console gaming is on its death bed. Used game sales would only kill consoles much like the 1980s.

so? if people don't want to buy games for consoles anymore, then they'll start buying games for pc or ipad or any other system. the console market doesn't have any inherent value. you buy a console so you can play games. if the console market dies, those same games will come out on another platform.

if anything, it'll be nice to be able to play all the big games without needing to buy hundreds of dollars worth of gaming system.

 

[RatRace123]

No no no no no no no, BAD THINKING!

I don't totally like the used games model, but I prefer it a hell of a lot more than Digital Distribution.
At least with used games you're still getting a hard copy of the game and you're supporting the store you got it from, keeping it in business and keeping it a viable alternative to a Digital monopoly.

 

[Kopikatsu]

I remember those halcyon days, sir. Back then Developers didn't moan about second hand sales at all.

The main guilty party in all this is the publishers, they want massive returns on their investments and screw the developers out of money they should have been getting and or are entitled to. Trying to recoup their losses, the devs screw us by releasing bad quality or buggy games or games with chunks missing.

The Halcyon cost $2,500 on release and, adjusted for inflation, would cost $5,000 today. Just throwing that out there.

Anyway, like I said earlier, Super Mario Bros for the SNES cost $49.99. Moderm games cost $59.99. Somehow, I doubt Super Mario Bros took millions of dollars and hundreds of people to develop, like most modern AAA games do. So, that means that they actually need a great deal more money to continue functioning as a company. A single game that doesn't sell well is enough to put many companies in the ground these days.

As far as I'm concerned, when I buy something - it becomes my own personal property. If I decide to sell it on for whatever reason, I am well within my rights to do so. It is and would be completely immoral for the publishers or developers to come over demanding a cut of the proceeds, the only companies that do this are organised crime syndicates such as the Mafia.

You're wrong. The video game industry says that you're wrong, and the law agrees that you're wrong. If you don't like their business practices, don't buy video games anymore. That's how capitalism works. You aren't allowed to have your cake and eat it too. This is why boycotts fail, because people don't understand that. Besides, it's not like they keep the fact that you're only paying for a license to use the system a secret. The last two letters in EULA stand for 'licensing agreement'.

All this is avoidable if the publishers simply stopped screwing the developer. If this happened, the developers would make full and complete games, they wouldn't be so buggy and would be a lot more fun to play - and as such, will be more likely to be kept around.

This...is true. But! Capitalism. Publishers have a duty to their shareholders to ride developers. That's just how the system is set up.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

"I love digital distribution," he said. "For one thing, being environmentally conscious, I really appreciate that we're not making more boxes and shipping them and creating all that waste."

...thanks, but I prefer to have my games on discs if I can help it. It's good to know that the worst I'd lose are save files if my computer crashes rather than, say, the entire game.

"It's better just to download the game through Steam and not have to have all that packaging. One of the things I enjoyed with Fallout: New Vegas was that digital distribution of the DLC made things more flexible in terms of getting the content done. You didn't have to worry about production times for discs, and so you could take an extra week if you needed that to get things right."

Then things got a bit grim.

Things are already looking grim. He just said that digital distribution is literally a means to ship an incomplete game. The New Vegas DLCs didn't come out a week after the game was released, so that 'week' is presumably the period when they're fixing all the bugs that they didn't 'waste' time on before their shipping date.

"Of course, one of the greatest things about digital distribution is what it does to reduce the used game market," he said. "I hope digital distribution stabs the used game market in the heart."

The ironic thing? I'm pretty sure Bethesda's spokesman was talking about how the used game market was just incentive for developers to make games worth keeping. How could two groups that worked on the same project have such dramatically different reactions to the same issue?

 

[Doom972]

I hope Obsidian's digital distribution model stabs all the money they would've spent on retail profits and physical objects off the digital price.

But I guess that would be just silly, now wouldn't it?

Pretty much my thoughts on the subject. You'll notice digitally purchused games cost the same as their physical counterparts, and oftentimes more if you look at the console distribution services.

Given that the high asking price is justified by the abillity to recoup part of that expense through trade ins, one would expect them to lower the prices if they wanted to cut down on used game trade ins, but at the end of the day they aren't REALLY concerned about the principle of the thing but how to make as much money as possible and there is no point in going after used games if they don't make any more money in the process of doing so.

On Steam, games that are only distributed digitally are much cheaper than the games that are also sold on retail. They can't have games that are sold in stores cost less on Steam because then the stores will complain about unfair competition (like what happened in Austrailia, where they have to pay the full retail price even on Steam.)
If you are patient though, you can just wait for the game you want to buy to be on a sale and get it for a better price.

How long do you expect that to last though?

Understand something, Gabe might be many things, but he's not stupid and never struck me as actually being all that generous from bits I've seen here and there despite his reputation. He seems to be engaged in a long term strategy similar to that of Wal*Mart.

The basic idea being that he undercuts everyone else's prices, reducing his own profits, but ensuring he gets a dedicated customer base due to all the games people own on his platform, and gradually driving the competition both from other digital services and hardcopy games out of business or reducing them to a minimal prescence. Once he has a virtual stranglehold he can stop offering the sales and great deals, and what are people going to do about it? He's the only game in town.

Do some reading on it, I'm as guilty as anyone of using STEAM and taking advantage of the deals, but there has been plenty written on the subject, including the analogy to Wal*Mart.... even going so far as to show how well Gabe allegedly treats his employees just as Wal*Mart treated theirs until they became virtually the only game in town. Gabe seems to be playing for the long term actually.

I've also heard some occasional rumors speculating that one of the reasons why Valve has been so horrendous with it's release schedule for games is financial issues. The reports of their profits being exagerrated because of all those sales, which means Valve doesn't actually have a lot of resources to invest in the actual games. Gabe being more interested in dominating the virtual marketplace in the long run, as opposed to game development... and that DOES make a degree of sense, especially if it's true that when Valve has a sale it's actually paying the differance to the creators in most cases.. so say a 50% sale winds up having Valve giving that 50% to the game creator, and ultimatly only making the fees it collects for hosting the game when that applies.

In the end nobody knows all the details except for Gabe, but it's something to consider. Listen to some anti-Valve rants sometime.

What? You mean Valve are trying to beat the competition by giving costumers better deals? Valve are the devil!!! /sarcasm
Every business wants its competitors to fail or be absorbed by it. Valve has many competitors - both digital and retail - and is not going to achieve monopoly anytime soon as I see it.
If Valve would get greedy, there is always a place for a new competitor to rise and give better deals.
We don't have to over analyze the market and try to figure out what might happen in the long run. We just have to be wise consumers and remember to check the alternatives and discourage dick moves by voting with our wallets.

 

[Yosarian2]

The alternative is watching more and more "pre-owned" and "trade-in" game shops opening (or other chains expanding into that area as has happened with say Best Buy or Amazon in the US) and their market share and profits on most games without long-term multiplayer getting smaller and smaller as has been happening for the past 5+ years.

So? Used bookstores have been around forever, too.

Yes, used game sales are inherently better for customers and worse for the big game companies. Customers save money when they buy games and get money back when they're finished them, while the big game companies make a little less profits. So what? If you're a big game company, I can understand why you wouldn't want it, but if you're a game consumer, it's clearly in your best interest.

Never let a big company manipulate you by making you feel guilty for doing things you have a perfect right to do.

 

[Nurb]

I hope piracy makes up for the diminishing used game market you hate so much, Obsidian.

I'm going to do what I can to avoid paying for a new copy, how do you like them apples? I'll make sure to buy used whenever possible (the same effect as piracy according to them) just because I love to hear you developers whine like a *****. Anything to keep money from going to developers that forget they were gamers once and treat customers like criminals and suckers to shake upside down for their loose change.

There's no big developer/publisher worth supporting anymore or any that make me care if they lose money from piracy, used games, or negative reviews they always cry about.

You're wrong. The video game industry says that you're wrong, and the law agrees that you're wrong. If you don't like their business practices, don't buy video games anymore. That's how capitalism works. You aren't allowed to have your cake and eat it too. This is why boycotts fail, because people don't understand that. Besides, it's not like they keep the fact that you're only paying for a license to use the system a secret. The last two letters in EULA stand for 'licensing agreement'.

For all the hot air about piracy and used games, people in the industry are remarkably prone to telling people to fuck off if they don't like it, as though the industry doesn't mind losing a customer anywhere near as much as they mind not being able to force people to give them money.

We're supposed to have sympathy for them too, even though by their own arguments they deserve to die off. Piracy and used games are killing the market, but the response to any legitimate complaint is to stop buying games if we don?t like it. If people act rationally and refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater and download a game or buy used, we?re killing them. What would they rather have us do? "Talk with our wallets" and not play the games at all, and certainly don?t buy them. Which would also kill the industry, but that?s somehow the more moral solution. Either way the industry is basically daring us to kill it.

Most people are talking with their wallets, which is why the market is shrinking. And what message does the industry take from that? That they should do something different? Nope. The message is that they should simply move to consoles due to a shrinking market they surely can?t be responsible for. So even when we do follow the "moral" way, nothing changes. So the decision, from our view, is between "No Games, Dead Industry" and "Used/Pirated Games, Dead Industry".

In other words, if the industry isn?t going to get the message no matter what we do and is going to die either way, why should we care? Should I feel sorry for Ken Levine not getting paid for a good game? Nope. The industry doesn?t care about fucking us over in the name of unproven piracy damages and losses to a used market, so I don?t see why we should care if a few decent developers get crushed in the name of taking down an industry that could not possibly care less about doing proper business with us.

BTW It IS your property, and the courts have almost always thrown out EULAs for being too far-reaching. There's no other industry that allows a company to claim ownership or rights to more money after initial sale. Cars, TVs, and any other product can be purchased and resold without manufacturers crying like babies about not getting more money when their customer resells a used product.

 

[Asuka Soryu]

Eww, I hate digital. Though I'd laugh and cry if digital killed solid, killed the second hand-market and then killing game sales like crazy, 'causing a huge crash in gaming.

 

[Luke Cartner]

I would strongly disagree that the used game market and piracy have little in common for an ethical perspective.
Both result in the copyright holder not getting paid for there efforts. Both include people not paying for a license to use that copyright (in the form of the game).
Just because you paid some money does not make it ethical anymore than paying for a pirated game would be.

So what if your game doesn't work either because of a bug or something else.
What recourse should you have if you can't sell it? You can't return it because its opened. You can't sue because of the eula

If there is a bug (which to be honest is highly unlikely that it wont be patched but ok) it should be patched.

If you just dont like it buy from a retailer like eb games which allow returns for refunds in the first week.

Umm that return policy is if you buy the game used. I like to buy new. Skyrim btw has a game crushing bug on ps3 they said would NOT get patched so it happens.

Hmm I cant comment on where you live; but here in Australia (which usually get the raw deal) you can return any game within 7 days of purchase. That said as I buy all my games from steam now it doesn't matter..
As for Skyrim I feel for you its a great game; just a shame it doesn't get the same dev focus on the consoles as the pc..

 

[Luke Cartner]

I would strongly disagree that the used game market and piracy have little in common for an ethical perspective.
Both result in the copyright holder not getting paid for there efforts. Both include people not paying for a license to use that copyright (in the form of the game).
Just because you paid some money does not make it ethical anymore than paying for a pirated game would be.

Actually its true. Pirates have far more ethics than used game buyers. Allow me to explain

Who makes money off of these ventures?

Piracy: No one, its all free.

Used Games: The used gamer who is getting 30 dollars, and the gamestop assholes who get another 20 dollars by selling it so some sheep of a used gamer that buys it for 5 dollars less than new.

They have every right to be pissy over someone else making money off of their work without them seeing a penny.

I am sure you (editorial you, not the person I quoted <3) would be pissed if you put in 8 hours of work, then the person who tells your boss the work is done gets payed instead of you. I mean, thats fair though right? They did something so they should get payed, it doesn't matter that you did all of the work and deserve the rewards of such.

I agree completely.
Personally I'm not saying either pre owned games are unethical or outside of moral questions at all.
I have opinions on that which I wont get into.

What I am saying is if you claim piracy raises an ethical question preowned games raises the same ethical question. With the added bonus of paying someone who added no value to the game at all for the privilege of infringing on the copy right.

 

[Sotanaht]

In order for the game to be classified as 'Used' it has to have been 'Purchased' first.

So even if ten million people buy a used game, the devs still sold ten million copies of a game that was most likely priced at roughly $50-75.

That's a huge amount of cash.

It would be theoretically possible for ten million people to sequentially buy and trade in the SAME COPY of a used game. Practically impossible, but it isn't that infrequent for the same copy to change hands three, four, or even five times. That 10 million could easily be several million fewer actual new sales.

i don't see the problem with preowned games being sold.
we do it with everything else so why not games?

Real answer (that they won't just come out and say): "We're trying to expand our profit base to avoid the "make a mega-hit or die" situation we've found ourselves in as publishers; to put it bluntly, we need more money."

Sad corollary to this: If people have to pay full price and can't trade in old games for new ones, fewer games will be bought. Any potential gains seen by the publishers will be minor and not enough to stave off disaster.

No, more "to put it bluntly, we want more money". They aren't planning to avoid the "mega hit or die", they are planning to make even more profit off of their already safe mega hits. Which, btw, will never be reinvested into more more risky games.

 

[Luke Cartner]

I hope piracy makes up for the diminishing used game market you hate so much, Obsidian.

I'm going to do what I can to avoid paying for a new copy, how do you like them apples? I'll make sure to buy used whenever possible (the same effect as piracy according to them) just because I love to hear you developers whine like a *****. Anything to keep money from going to developers that forget they were gamers once and treat customers like criminals and suckers to shake upside down for their loose change.

There's no big developer/publisher worth supporting anymore or any that make me care if they lose money from piracy, used games, or negative reviews they always cry about.

You're wrong. The video game industry says that you're wrong, and the law agrees that you're wrong. If you don't like their business practices, don't buy video games anymore. That's how capitalism works. You aren't allowed to have your cake and eat it too. This is why boycotts fail, because people don't understand that. Besides, it's not like they keep the fact that you're only paying for a license to use the system a secret. The last two letters in EULA stand for 'licensing agreement'.

For all the hot air about piracy and used games, people in the industry are remarkably prone to telling people to fuck off if they don't like it, as though the industry doesn't mind losing a customer anywhere near as much as they mind not being able to force people to give them money.

We're supposed to have sympathy for them too, even though by their own arguments they deserve to die off. Piracy and used games are killing the market, but the response to any legitimate complaint is to stop buying games if we don?t like it. If people act rationally and refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater and download a game or buy used, we?re killing them. What would they rather have us do? "Talk with our wallets" and not play the games at all, and certainly don?t buy them. Which would also kill the industry, but that?s somehow the more moral solution. Either way the industry is basically daring us to kill it.

Most people are talking with their wallets, which is why the market is shrinking. And what message does the industry take from that? That they should do something different? Nope. The message is that they should simply move to consoles due to a shrinking market they surely can?t be responsible for. So even when we do follow the "moral" way, nothing changes. So the decision, from our view, is between "No Games, Dead Industry" and "Used/Pirated Games, Dead Industry".

In other words, if the industry isn?t going to get the message no matter what we do and is going to die either way, why should we care? Should I feel sorry for Ken Levine not getting paid for a good game? Nope. The industry doesn?t care about fucking us over in the name of unproven piracy damages and losses to a used market, so I don?t see why we should care if a few decent developers get crushed in the name of taking down an industry that could not possibly care less about doing proper business with us.

BTW It IS your property, and the courts have almost always thrown out EULAs for being too far-reaching. There's no other industry that allows a company to claim ownership or rights to more money after initial sale. Cars, TVs, and any other product can be purchased and resold without manufacturers crying like babies about not getting more money when their customer resells a used product.

Wow;
So your saying if they make it harder for you to pay gamestop to rip them off you'll just cut out the middleman and rip them off for free?
Just wow.
Two simple questions:
1) Since your not contributing towards the cost of the game anyways why not download it yourself and save some cash as your default action? I mean seriously neither action helps the developer but atleast if you download it you save money and dont contribute to the leach that is game stop.
2) Since you admit to preferring piracy if you cant buy it pre owned and neither action and Obsidian do see any money from you either way; why should they care how you feel about this?
I mean its not as if you are adding value or contributing to them.

But seriously wow.. all that anger because they actually want to be paid for their work..

 

[Therumancer]

Gabe, but it's something to consider. Listen to some anti-Valve rants sometime.

What? You mean Valve are trying to beat the competition by giving costumers better deals? Valve are the devil!!! /sarcasm
Every business wants its competitors to fail or be absorbed by it. Valve has many competitors - both digital and retail - and is not going to achieve monopoly anytime soon as I see it.
If Valve would get greedy, there is always a place for a new competitor to rise and give better deals.
We don't have to over analyze the market and try to figure out what might happen in the long run. We just have to be wise consumers and remember to check the alternatives and discourage dick moves by voting with our wallets.[/quote]

It's called Predatory Pricing. Whether it will succeed or not Valve's strategy seems to be to take the losses to undercut the competition so it can exploit being the only remaining game in town when everyone else goes out of business.

After what happened with Wal*Mart people have become more aware of it, and yes Valve has more competition in the same arena than Wal*Mart did.

The point here is that I don't think these sales are motivated out of generosity or could be used as an example of what lies ahead should everything go entirely digital.

 

[Therumancer]

[It does not matter what the developers want, it matters what the shareholders want. And the shareholders, by the by, are a bunch of disconnected morons who just want bigger and bigger profits so their shares can be worth more. And unless the profits of any company are steadily going up, if they remain stagnant for even a single quater, the company will take a hit based on the unrealistic expectations of the shareholders.

Nothing can grow for ever so to make profits these days you have to stop other things from growing, you have to attack the things that are stopping you from growing as fast. And, to put it very, very simply... If nobody ever bought a used game and everyone who has ever played the title bought their copy at full (Or even half) price from the company that produced the games and not from GAME or similar as a used copy, the company would make more profit and shares would go up in value. This is what the companies want, this is what they need, to keep investment at a premium and to keep shareholders happy.

We seem to be saying some very similar things on a basic level.

Your correct about the nature of the system in place, but my point is that this system and mentality does not HAVE to exist. The entire infrastructure with corperate boards, shareholders, and similar things developed because it's the best way to make money. A lot of investors can get together and pay developers more money to produce games.

You nuke the entire system, with developers lowering their expectations in terms of pay and lifestyle, that lowers the amount of money this requires, in turn reducing the need for this kind of corperate culture to exist. At the end of the day it should all come down to everyone having gotten paid, and if the game made more money than it cost to develop then that's a win.

The corperate mentality can be justified, but only within the reality it's created for itself. That is why I am speaking against the entire system, and school of thought.

 

[Therumancer]

Ah, a lot of unsourced talk about what you think working as a game developer is actually like. In lieeu of wading through every line and pointing out how its wrong, 'll stick to oen argument.

You claim that because there is a wider market, there should be lower prices? This is the biggest load of crap anyone has ever said on this site. No medium, in the history of mankind, has lowered prices because it got a wider market. Even if it didn't, didja notice the thing about how games used to cost $120 in todays money? And even then, how about the fact that modern games offer several billion times the content of old games?

Actually I have sourced a lot of what I've said from Game Informer, or simple common knowlege (or what should be to this community) based on things like the whole "Duke Nukem Forever" fiasco. Tons of places all over the internet and in game magazines have talked about how games are produced and developed and the relationship between the two sides.

In general when someone decides to call me on my sources, it usually means that they have little else to say. I don't post links constantly because I post them so bloody often that it's annoying and borders on spam. If you check some of the back messages I've written on the subject you can probably find enough sources and links to choke a bloody horse. It's sort of like when I go off about China, or Muslim culture, or whatever else... I fail to see the need to repete myself on the same site 30 gajillion times, especially seeing as it amounts to doing other people's research for them. I'm a bit nicer about it here than I was in arguements on Palladium's "Sound Off" forums but I'm rapidly getting to the point of simply saying that I'm not going to bother doing people's research for them at all, because in the end if they can't find it on their own they are apparently too biased for it to matter no matter what I decided to put up.

As far as the rest goes, the point of mass production and distribution is to lower prices. When a new product comes out and is availible in limited quantities the price is high, but when it's produced in massive quantities to a bigger audience the price goes down. It's a very simple principle.

When it comes to games to begin with you had like maybe a dozen guys if they were lucky handling everything in the course of making and packaging a game, with a lot of game development companies literally operating out of a basement. Nowadays they produce "gold masters" of games and then can literally churn out millions of duplicates on a moment's notice. You don't for example have to have a guy sitting there sticking every disk into a floppy drive to run off each individual copy... or worse yet a Tape Drive if you even know what one of those is since we're talking the 1980s. While I was very young, I remember when the 5' 1/4" Floppy Disk was a radical new invention... and the 3.5" disk... OMG magic. Years later I was really impressed with my 40 Meg Hard Drive (sooo much space).

The point here is that the gaming industry is one of the few industries that has not evolved like other businesses due to deliberate effort on it's part. That's part of why it engages in cartel behavior, things like setting a set price for games irregardless of their budget, and moving release schedules so as not to directly compete with each other.

At least in the US the basic idea is for companies to directly compete with each other to produce the highest quality product, for the lowest possible price. We don't see that when a game that costs a million dollars and one that costs a hundred million retail for the same price. Having a monopoly, or an industry collaberating to set prices is illegal as you see with all the contreversy over gas prices and the like.

The point here is that your wrong when it comes to the prices, by all accounts the cost of video games should have fallen through the floor.

 

[ozium]

Obsidian has nothing to worry about. Their games are so awful nobody buys them in the first place so there are no used copies available. I hope somebody stabs this guy in the ass with a 10 inch dildo.

 

[Sutter Cane]

Obsidian has nothing to worry about. Their games are so awful nobody buys them in the first place so there are no used copies available. I hope somebody stabs this guy in the ass with a 10 inch dildo.

So the sensible reaction to someone saying they don't like the used games market (and note that's all he said, he didn't endorse project 10 dollar or insult those that buy used games), is to have him violently sexually assaulted?