THQ Won't Punish Gamers Who Buy Pre-Owned

[Jkudo]

Could someone explain to me why pre-owned sales make developers and publishers mad? I'm fairly certain that enough people buy new to give them a decent profit, and used games have already been sold new once, so they got a cut from that.

Of course cheaper releases in the first place may help but one thing at a time.

Also, this.

Lets say there are 10,000 people who would buy your game, so 10,000 sales to be made.
Lets say only 1,000 people actually buy new, the remaining 9,000 wait for used.
Lets say your game sells for £40 new, of which £15 is mark up by the retailer, £15 is publisher, and £10 is developer.

Lets say over its life, the average used price is £15.

You as a developer made £10,000
You as a publisher made £15,000

The retailer makes £15,000 (new) + £135,000 (used).

And you wonder why they're mad.

(all figures are purely for illustrative purposes, but not that far from the truth)

Your math is wrong. See if there are 10,000 people who would buy your game, in order for 9,000 to buy it used, at least 9,000 would have to buy it new.

So its impossible for 1,000 to buy new and 9,000 to buy used. So the rest is impossible. The retailer would not be making that much and the developer and publisher already got paid for the copies. They are just mad that someone else is getting paid as well. I'm not a fan of any idea that stops me from bringing a copy over to a friends house to play. How could you really want other companies to follow this? What if you bought halo reach and wanted to bring it over a friends house to play :/ (halo is just an example ofc, it could be any multiplayer game).
Also although buying used you are not giving money to the company, people often times trade in there games to afford new ones. So if they do something like this, the attractiveness of used games is lessened, so the money you would get for trading them in is lowered, so people end up buying less games. Thq makes horrible games anyway, why would you pay full price for a new iteration of the same thing every year? You would have to REALLY enjoy the games because otherwise it doesn't seem worth it at all.

 

[Jkudo]

Provoking the (pre-owned) consumers or even treating them like a animal in a cage, they will find a way around the system be it legal or illegal.

Who cares if they do? Publishers cannot make less money from that market segment than they do now, as they currently get $0. People who buy videogames used right now are simply not their customers - measures like this, ham-handed or otherwise, are attempts to change that, and as plans go it's pretty foolproof. After all, what are consumers buying used games now going to do if they don't like it, not give publishers any money some more? They're already doing that!

The fact of the matter is that if you only buy games used, you might as well be boycotting the companies that make them - they have nothing to lose by potentially annoying you whilst in the pursuit of making some money off of the very large segment that currently does not give them any.

The fact is people dont buy used because they dont want to support the industry, they buy used because games are expensive and often times unreasonably priced. And like i said in my post above, the sales of new games may decline as well. I'm all for supporting the game developers and publishers i like,in fact i make sure i buy new for games i think i'll really like from developers i like, but many games just aren't worth the money.

 

[SelectivelyEvil13]

Sure gaming companies can bemoan the fact that gamers would rather buy their games pre-owned than new, but all they need to do is look in the mirror; who in the world today can afford 50-70 euros for a new game (or anywhere between 60-100 dollars)? Even pre-owned prices are getting out of hand, what with Gamestop asking for nearly new prices for hand me down games.

And now making gamers shill out extra to play online? Bite me, studios, first give us a compelling reason to pay the full price for a single player game first!

I concur, I already have stopped buying 360 games because I feel cheated for not paying for Live and thus not having the multiplayer option (even though I am content with single player). But more and more games in general are $60 yet seem to offer nothing but a shallow romp that a rent could equally provide with a multiplayer tacked on with little rhyme or reason. Now I see no reason as to why I should pay their $60 for a new game when I'm not even seeing the value of a complete single player so often, let alone give a toss about "additional" DLC content and now this used-game online parasite.

Could someone explain to me why pre-owned sales make developers and publishers mad? I'm fairly certain that enough people buy new to give them a decent profit, and used games have already been sold new once, so they got a cut from that.

Of course cheaper releases in the first place may help but one thing at a time.

Also, this.

Apparently they believe it is a cardinal sin that every buyer of a game, say Call of Duty, does not pay the full price (preferably $60 at release). Person A plays MW2 for a few weeks ($60), slaps themselves and sells to gamestop. Person B buys that MW2 for however much, but the poor greedy --[sub][sub]oh let's be real[/sub][/sub]-- the poor greedy SOBs don't make a total of $120 for their game.

[snipped]

Spoiler

Maybe if publishers stopped taking 70% profits and giving multi-million dollar self-initiated bonuses to the lazy CEO's at the top the developers would see more money too.

You know what games industry? I'm getting really fucking sick of your shit.
We're the people who keep you alive. If you're like me you probably spend thousands of dollars a year on the games industry, and what do we get for it?

Not a fucking thing. We just get told "Waaaaahhhh I want more money! Waaaahhhhhhh you aren't spending enough." Go to fucking hell.

You know, even at a sub shop if you buy 12 you get one free - publishers need to do more to REWARD consumers not fucking juice them for every god damn penny. Maybe the size of the gaming population just isn't enough to sustain the industry how it is. In that case, I guess you're shit out of luck here.

If you lowered prices more people would buy your games and you would PROBABLY make more money. Valve saw sales increase by about 10,000% in some of their reduced price experiments, maybe people should actually be paying attention to this. They're doing the hard work FOR you - they're collecting data and taking sales risks and it worked. Gabe even gave a presentation about this at GDC about how games just cost too much money; is no one fucking listening?

What about the stories I've heard from the Rockstar Texas office? With the manager who came back with prostitutes and several thousand dollars worth of expensive wine to his office in a new car while the devs worked their 8th 90 hour week? This industry is rotting and it's rotting from the fucking top. Remove extraneous and bad management, trim ALL the fat from the publishers and give the developers the proper time and money to make their games with the proper incentives upon sales.

Absolutely!!!

This is probably one of the most egregious problems with corporations in general, and the games industry is no different. The top tier dictate over the people actually making the games to spew out formulaic cash-grabs in the quickest amount of time. Then after that they want to drain the consumer base further in any feasible manner.

If they want to screw over the used game buyers, what is to stop them from expanding onto those who buy new anyway? The price of games is not easily justified considering the factors that drain an indvidual game's quality in the development process, sometimes simply because of the publisher. It is not the consumer's fault that a game is not worth $60 to them and are only interested if they can find a cheaper price. Now because those (likely most) consumers do not see the value in the product, they will be restricted in content or punished for finding a better offer on price. Well, for instance, what if nobody bought THQ's stupid wrestling game in the first place? Or the next stupid game, or the one after that? Punishment switches sides because obviously the consumers are not missing out on a product they don't want. We just want some quality and value, not a destroyed shell of the games industry.