Used Game Sales are a "Bigger Problem Than Piracy"

[steamweedlegoblin]

I only buy a game at full price if I absolutely know that I'm going to love it. Games are too expensive and too short to drop 60 bucks for each one. So long as there are retailers that sell physical copies of video games, there will be a second-hand market. Guys like this can complain until their eyeballs fall out, but there's nothing they can do to stop it except to quit releasing physical copies and only distribute games digitally. Even then, it's only a matter of time before games bought digitally are allowed to be traded in or sold, if it hasn't been done already.

 

[Cryo84R]

The only people with a larger sense of entitlement than gamers are welfare recipients.

If you can't afford something, don't buy it (Nuts, I know!). Developers don't see anything from used game sales and the guy doing code or art is definatly NOT a fatcat.

 

[adderseal]

Well its legal and i personally made £600 pounds from it last year so bah! I think if games where more reasonably priced then i would buy more new games.

Holy shit. You made £600 from TRADING IN games? If you don't mind me asking, how many games did you buy last year?

Unless I misunderstood and you own a used game business...

 

[Tzekelkan]

How are games revenus only "a fraction of what they were just a few years ago" because of used sales? Have used game sales skyrocketed for no reason these last few years, while a some years ago everyone was buying new? What bullshit.

Maybe people don't buy your games new because they're rubbish, or they're priced too high. Also, I hear there's sort of an economic thing going on right now, and I hear people are having trouble getting/keeping jobs. What, do game publishers/developers think they're the only ones affected by the recession? Oh, the poor guys, while everyone else is swimming in money and happy to pay extra for the same features you were getting free a while ago.

 

[Macgyvercas]

If new games were cheaper, I wouldn't have to buy games used. Come on, I'm a college student, for god's sake! I'm broke by definition!

 

[cieply]

Oooooooooooh how glad I am that I'm sailing the high seas. I'll leave you, hard working and fair gamers to your distributors. Noone cares about pirates but sooner or later you will enlist on our ship as well.

Our games are ours to play. Harrr!

 

[GonzoGamer]

Really these guys should actually be the only ones happy with Gamestop.
They've done their best to ruin the used game market.
While I used to get used games for cheap, Gamestop has gouged all the prices so that even buying online is close enough to the new price that I tend to usually buy games new. If it's only a difference of a couple of bucks, I buy new. It's funny because back when you could get a 3 month old game off ebay for $10, they didn't complain about it as much.

Now that there's no value in the used game market, I don't care if the devs find a way to stop it. There are too many gamestops around anyway and most of the people who work at them are really too dense to put correct games in the cases.

 

[Me55enger]

We get arrested if we steal it and we get shafted if we buy it.

Clearly the don't like making money.

 

[Don't taze me bro]

I have long had an issue with the used game business. I worked for EB Games/ Gamestop for a few years, and there is a reason that the area managers used to say 'Pre-owned games are the lifeblood of the company'. The used game market makes 'MASSIVE' profits because the margin of profit on them are so high. This is the reason staff are trained to ALWAYS offer a used copy over a new one. They will actively try dissuade you from buying a new one and of course this affects the industry. Places like Gamestop are reaping the benefits over and over and over, while the people who brought you the game are missing out.

I don't like the idea of EA's project $10, but it was inevitable to try and claw back some kind of money at the expense of used game buyers.
To the people who are QQing about views expressed in the article, just stop and think of ANY way the pre-owned business is good for the longevity of the gaming industry, especially with Walmart thinking of re-entering the business.

 

[chris11246]

I dont understand why the developers dont try to get retailers to give them a part of the used sales like they do the new ones. Then it wouldnt be so bad for them. I mean how much does Gamestop make on a used game. They usually buy them really cheap and sell them for just under the new price its not like they cant give the developer some. They just need to demand it.

 

[Tzekelkan]

If you can't afford something, don't buy it. Developers don't see anything from used game sales and the guy doing code or art is definatly NOT a fatcat.

Really? You've never, ever bought anything used and you never plan on ever doing so? Not a car, not a piece of furniture, not anything from a yard sale? After all, if you can't afford it, don't buy it, right? You'd rather walk than touch a used car, right? *shudder*

 

[Icehearted]

This sounds just as monopolistic as the RIAA shit and their wanting to ban recording devices of all kinds couple of years back. Just another part of this slippery slope of ambiguous ownership (ie: nitwits that say you never actually own the game you buy).

-snip-

Might wanna edit that.

Might not; this little shit-streak just wants multiple payments for a single item. In essence, he want a cut of every single sale after the first. Fuck him. Fuck him in the ear.

That sounds like the kind of shit I'd say. Also, props on the handle! I really like the cut of your jib, dude!

 

[holographicman]

I know that there have been evil moments in the games industry for as long as gaming has been around.
but
Is seems as if the gaming industry been going through an
evil renaissance over the past year. EA drm, Nintendo being the ***** of casual gamers,
Microsoft (who has been evil from the start, Gamestop, Activision vs. Infinity Ward,
Gamestop again, etc.

?

 

[FoolKiller]

The math is still bad.

If you buy it used the extra content we give for free will cost you 10 dollars. Fine, I will buy it used when it is 19.99 and get the content for 10. Still better than the 70 I would have to pay for it otherwise.

And there is nothing wrong with second hand. Why shouldn't we have it that way? Try finding an older game brand new. How am I supposed to find less popular good games without the used market. I haven't seen games that are 2 or 3 years old for sale except in a store that sells used. I don't have time to play everything when it comes out even if I could afford it.

 

[bificommander]

I only own a PC, and there is no real second-hand PC gaming market, so I'm unaffected by this. But I do disagree that there's something wrong with secondhand games. I'm sure the car industry would also make a lot more if there was no second-hand trading of used cars. But there is, and it's legal. The makers sell their product to someone, and once the first owner no longer wants or needs it, he sells it to someone else. It's fair.

To Andrew's credit, he does't claim second-hand trade is evil or wrong, he just states it as a reason they don't get more money. To his discredit, he makes use of the piracy-profit-loss-calculation: A game has 4 owners during its life, so we only get a quarter of the money. Because if there wasn't a second hand market, all 4 of those people would have bought our game for the full price, obviously. Not only is it doubtfull the last 3 would fork over the whole amount, it isn't even certain the first guy would have bought it if he knew he wouldn't be allowed to sell it.

 

[thenoblepenguin]

Am I the only one here who's curious as to what game is depicted in the graphic of this article? Call me a n00b for not recognizing it, but I slogged through this entire thread looking for someone to ask the question I'm asking, but no one has. So please, sate my curiosity and tell me from what game the screenshot is taken.

As for my opinion on the whole thing, I think that second-hand gaming is perfectly fine (zero percent of my 360 library was bought by me personally; I either borrowed my games from friends or received them as gifts) since it's legal, present in any market anyway(e.g. cars, books, furniture, etc.) and, as has been said before in this thread, can retroactively add new potential buyers for future games by developers of otherwise overlooked titles. I must say, however, that I dislike the opinion that if I can't afford to buy every single one of my titles new that I shouldn't buy games at all. Obviously, not being able to shell out $60+ dollars every week is indicative of not socioeconomic factors compounded with the costs of going to college (without a cent of help from my parents due to their own financial troubles) and living on my own for the first time but of my obvious incompetence as a human being. Thanks, WASPs. I wasn't at all expecting to feel personally insulted by the time I got my simple question answered.

 

[Gvaz]

I might consider not buying used games if used games weren't so cheap.

Conversely, I might consider buying new games if games weren't so expensive!

 

[Alar]

I suppose it's nice that the game developers are throwing in these one-time-use goodies rather than, say, trying to completely ban the sale of used games. I would have expected them to try something like that, personally.

 

[SimuLord]

I like EAs idea of offering incentives to buying the game new, and fuck trading games.

I'm with you on this. If you're going to buy used, you might as well pirate it (or spend the extra five or ten bucks for new). Same net effect for the publisher---in fact, one could argue that piracy is BETTER for developers than used games because if retailers can't sell used games, the model will die out.

What the hell is everyone talking about? Buying used games is absolutely fine. If you buy used you might aswell pirate it? What the hell are you talking about?

If a game is pirated the developer and publisher receive no revenue from the sale. If a game is sold on the secondhand market? Ditto. The retailer (Gamestop or whoever) gets the difference between the sale price and the buck-fifty they paid the poor sucker who traded the game in. The developer and publisher who made and published the game don't get squat.

And it's worse than piracy because someone was willing to pay for the game and STILL didn't generate any revenue for them! Pirates, as we all know, don't count. They wouldn't be customers even if they could legally acquire their games---fercrissakes even a "choose your own price" game that could've cost them one cent got pirated widely!

Point of the matter is that used games take a bite out of real sales. That's what makes them worse than piracy.

 

[The Hungry Samurai]

I'm not sure why so many are taking this so personally. The villain in this situation are the ones selling the used games, not the developers or the gamers.

I'm going to pull a few ideas out of my rear but IMHO the gaming market is unique when compared to other companies with a thriving used market. By the time a car, or house is put on the market a second time, the original seller has usually already made sufficient profit on his product and is moving on to his next project or model. DVD sales I'd imagine are usually just supplementary to the box office profits, and are usually dropping in popularity before they are commonly available in the used market, and even people who buy college text books new will use them for an entire semester before putting them back on the market (usually with a good amount of wear and tear that will give a new copy the next semester an advantage that may be worth the extra sales)

In the gaming market I'd imagine that the most important profits are earned during the 3 month quarter in which a game is released, and most non MMO games have a lifespan of about 2-days to a month. Therefore, when a game like Beatles: Rock Band is released in September in hopes of making profit for the holidays, it's sales will be harmed by the many players who have beaten the entire game within a day and sold it back to Gamestop who push the used copy over the new one as soon as they can get it onto a shelf.

Not to mention the fact that gamestop is buying those games back to you at a fraction of what they sold it to you for in the first place, AND what they're going to resell it to the next guy for.

I'm sure enhancing re playability in an ideal world would fix the problem but it is INCREDIBLY difficult to make a game that will hold the average gamers attention span for more than 3 months without providing some of DLC or additional content. Since additional content is not free to make I doubt it will ever come without extra fee's or some form of monthly charge.

Providing bonus content to first hand buyers is a perfectly good method to regain that edge and I think we will only benefit from the developers competing to match the unfair system resellers have set up in the gaming market.

Again IMHO when games developers make more money it will either A. keep them satisfied thus preventing the price of games from going up. or B. Give the developers more budget to work with on more innovative future projects.

In the long run we all win when gamers buy games new and keep money going to the developers.