Used Game Sales "Killing" Single Player Titles

[Dreadjaws]

This is absolute BS. It's a myth publishers love to spread to make people feel pity for them. Don't. The reason there's a huge used games market is because they don't care about making their games good enough and they're already too expensive. Up the fun and replayabilty, not to mention the length and then people won't be re-selling the game the same day they bought it.

Besides, the gaming industry is making billions, so the idea that they're hurting for money is laughable at best.

 

[A Pious Cultist]

And why do PC games cost 60 Euros now? There is no resale market on them.

Piracy.

It exists on consoles a bit but is no where near as prevalent as it was with the PS1 and modchips.

 

[CoL0sS]

We buy them used because they're expensive, and now apparently they're expensive because we buy them used. It's a wretched circle. With little good will on both sides there are no viable solutions and neither side is totally wrong.

Used games, however damaging are not the sole killer of single player titles, there's also a question of replayability, value for money, capitalizing on popular franchises, online passes, day one DLC, overpriced DLC etc. All that bad blood between certain publishers and consumers certainly doesn't help.

"Prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells," Braben stated.

I don't think he's right. How would he justify $60-$70 price tag on PC games that have no resell value? How would he justify a $70 price tag on a downloadable game that has no physical components ?
With Steam having monopoly in digital distribution (no matter what people at Origin would want us to believe) is it acceptable for publishers to price 4 months old games like Skyrim or MW3 at $70 and $80 dollars respectively. Will a consumer be satisfied when he spends $70 on a game like Darkness II and then completes it in 4 hours? This shit goes both ways and this finger-pointing helps no one.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

One thing is certain: games are NOT too expensive. You'd have to be 15 years old to even suggest such nonsense.

N64 games cost $70. SEVENTY FUCKING DOLLARS. This was more than 15 years ago. Since then, the prices of food and fuel have sky-rocketed. The cost of living, especially in dev hotspots on the coasts, is through the roof. Consider also the dev costs given the massive leaps in complexity and graphics since the 90s. It now costs tens of millions of dollars to push out a AAA title. Sure, the sales are greater (for SOME games), but enough to counter the now massive overhead costs?

Yet brand new AAA games are still just $60. I know that sounds like a lot to people who don't have full-time jobs or try to support a family at or near minimum wage, but that doesn't make it so. I make a modest living and have few financial responsibilities, and guess what? I can buy damn near every half-decent game released at full price, were I so inclined.

If anything, game makers are feeling the stresses because they HAVEN'T increased game prices to match inflation in 10-15 years. They're trying to do stuff with DLC and deluxe editions to help themselves out, but the financial realities of the situation are continually pushing them away from high-quality single-player offerings into the far safer realms of multiplayer and social gaming.

Are the attacks on used games misguided? Probably. But I think devs are doing everything they can to prevent price increases because they know there is a tipping point. I mean how bad does piracy get when games cost $80? Or $100? Yet as time rolls on, they're gonna have to start breaking those barriers in order to make development possible. If attacking the used game market can stave off those increases, I'm sorry, I'm all for it.

 

[Casey Bowen]

I don't buy the argument that used game sales = lost new game sales. At least not in the sense that every single used sale would have been a new one. That's just plain stupidity. Some people just don't buy new. Some people aren't going to risk the cash for an untried IP. Some people are less willing to spend full price on such short games. Whatever the case -- those used sales do not directly translate into lost new sales.

Hell, I've bought games I've borrowed (hence played used) because I got to try it first. And not just a demo that only showed me one aspect of the game. I've bought games as they were ported to different systems because I liked playing it on another one so much. I've also bought DLC I wouldn't have been willing to buy had I spent $60 on the game originally.

The greatest number of copies of used games are, strangely enough, often the games that sold the most new. I wonder why that is? Maybe because there are more of them out there!? Duh. It is pretty simple. Doesn't have anything to do with them being single or multi-player. Ever look into a store to see how many copies of Call of Duty are kicking around vs a strictly single player game ... say Skyrim? I'll bet you see a lot more CoD.

The publishers whine about how much money they aren't making from used sales. Give people a reason to buy the game new. It may cost a lot more to produce a game than it did even 10 years ago. But some of these companies still manage to make a profit? Produce something worthwhile and you'll make money.

It is a crock of manure that used games are killing the market especially for single player games. What's killing it is a dearth of worthwhile games.

 

[Treblaine]

Sure is 2002 in here.

Valve solved this problem almost a decade ago, it's called Steam and it suits everyone. Downloadable games, it's not contrived to prevent re-sales there while maximising further sales with an integrated marketplace. Microsoft could go that way too, just expand Xbox Live Arcade to sell the latest games. What if Halo 4 was released on XBLA?

 

[RatRace123]

Oddly enough, that kind of makes sense. Truly singleplayer titles have to have multiplayer shoehorned in so developers can add an online pass to recoup some of the used games sales.

As much as it makes sense, I still hate the methods used to "combat" used games. Like many have said, drop the 60 dollar price tag down a few bucks and you'll probably see more sales. Hell, even just a 10 dollar decrease will likely get more people to buy new.

As it stands now, the current methods are just pissing off customers who buy the game new.

 

[FiatCelebrity]

One thing is certain: games are NOT too expensive. You'd have to be 15 years old to even suggest such nonsense.

N64 games cost $70. SEVENTY FUCKING DOLLARS. This was more than 15 years ago. Since then, the prices of food and fuel have sky-rocketed. The cost of living, especially in dev hotspots on the coasts, is through the roof. Consider also the dev costs given the massive leaps in complexity and graphics since the 90s. It now costs tens of millions of dollars to push out a AAA title. Sure, the sales are greater (for SOME games), but enough to counter the now massive overhead costs?

Yet brand new AAA games are still just $60. I know that sounds like a lot to people who don't have full-time jobs or try to support a family at or near minimum wage, but that doesn't make it so. I make a modest living and have few financial responsibilities, and guess what? I can buy damn near every half-decent game released at full price, were I so inclined.

If anything, game makers are feeling the stresses because they HAVEN'T increased game prices to match inflation in 10-15 years. They're trying to do stuff with DLC and deluxe editions to help themselves out, but the financial realities of the situation are continually pushing them away from high-quality single-player offerings into the far safer realms of multiplayer and social gaming.

Are the attacks on used games misguided? Probably. But I think devs are doing everything they can to prevent price increases because they know there is a tipping point. I mean how bad does piracy get when games cost $80? Or $100? Yet as time rolls on, they're gonna have to start breaking those barriers in order to make development possible. If attacking the used game market can stave off those increases, I'm sorry, I'm all for it.

There's a common misconception that prices of a product from the past is some kind of indicator of what the price SHOULD (sorry, I wish I could italicize instead) be now. Certainly it has bearing on what we might speculate the price WILL be now or later, but it is not causally, directly related to what the price is now. It only comes into play when a seller with no other data is trying to price their own product in a market, or when a purchaser is judging what price they expect to pay. Equilibrium prices, which are the prices at which markets bear no shortage or excessive inventory, are those that correspond to the perception of supply and demand of a product from both the sellers' and purchasers' perspective, and the resulting competition between all sellers and purchasers. The gaming industry, especially the console games producers, has set up an agreement with each other regarding AAA games: "Let's all sell our new games that we dump small fortunes into at $60. If we establish a standard by which games can be seen as less credible if they are sold for less, we don't have to worry about out-bidding each other and our prices going down. This also allows us more incentive to find a formula that we can apply to mass produce video games so that we can guarantee the sales numbers at a fixed rate. We can then shave off all the parts of a game that are innovate and provide integrity, which would normally be what makes it competitive in the market. We'll make sure the selling formula is painfully obvious so as not to disappoint the drooling masses, reducing cost and providing a fantastic, processed, and spacious profit-margin."

As long as all these companies can depend on the price of AAA titles to remain fixed, or to come up if the person I am replying to had their way, they will find the formula that keeps the masses drooling, and reduce quality any way they can to inflate that profit margin. If, however, people like Gamestop continue to buy the games people don't want and sell them at a price they would rather pay, the actual judgement of their pesky discerning customers will have an outlet from which to express their true evaluation of games in a real way that forces the game companies to compete. In other words, game publishers, like all businessmen, want to corner the market so they can make more money without having to work to make games better. Taking away used game sales helps them do that. If there are not entities out there to correct the prices set by the cartel, consumers will always be at their mercy.

 

[Lunar Templar]

New game prices would have dropped long ago if publishers got a piece of the re-purchase.

and I'm sure he's got a lovely ocean front lot in Arizona to

I know publishers who have stopped games in development because most shops won't reorder stock after initial release

simple reason for that, THE GAME SUCKS

"It's killing single player games in particular, because they will get preowned, and it means your day one sales are it, making them super high risk."

and yet ...Skyrim ... it's called actually TRYING jackass, give it a go some time, see how it works

Braben said that having a game sell out the first day is not a good thing anymore. "The idea of a game selling out used to be a good thing, but nowadays, those people who buy it on day one may well finish it and return it," he said. "People will say 'Oh well, I paid all this money and it's mine to do with as I will', but the problem is that's what's keeping the retail price up.

no ... what keeping the prices up is the publishers want more money, i remember some saying they jerk the prices up even higher if they thought they could get away with it

On the other side of the counter, the kind of games you want to play are no longer thought as viable options for publishers and therefore might not get created at all. That's not really an option either.

welcome to my world Greg, a world a crap games you couldn't give me with maybe one or two a year worthy of my attention, let alone dime

 

[Zer_]

Prices of Video games for the NES in 1989 ranged between $30 and $70, with most sitting around the $50 mark. See here: http://www.salzmafia.com/uploaded_images/GamePro_Issue006_February_1990-092-791162.jpg. In today's dollars, those prices would be $55 to $128

Yet today, most xBox360 games cost between $20 and $60 if you exclude special editions and the like. That means the most common price today is only a few bucks more than the lowest prices in 1989.

Here's your swords and sorcery game from 1989: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Ironsword.png

Here's your swords and sorcery game from 2012
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/121/1217313/the-witcher-2-assassins-of-kings-20120126092508666.jpg

Yeah, game companies are *so* ripping us off when they continue to charge us about the same amount as they were charging for the bargain titles some 20 years ago.

Those games were sold on expensive as hell cartridges. DVDs are cheap as hell. Publishers are driving development costs through the roof. There are also ridiculously expensive ad campaigns.

Skyrim cost around ~$100,000,000. That's merely an estimate, probably lower than that in reality. That also actually include marketing costs. I wish Bethesda would release the numbers. Some estimates say Skyrim cost $60,000,000, though so who knows. Skyrim is a big game, so such a budget is understandable.

Bethesda made an estimated $620,000,000 off of Skyrim sales. "By December 16, 2011, this had risen to 10 million copies shipped to retail and around US$620 million"

Call of Duty [Modern Warfare 2] cost $40 million to $50 million to produce, people close to the project said, about as much as a mid-size film. Including marketing expenses and the cost of producing and distributing discs, the launch budget was $200 million, on par with a summer popcorn movie -- and extremely high for a video game.

The costs for CoD:MW2 are ridiculous, however. Actual development costs aren't too bad, it's just the amount spent on marketing that is astronomical. There's no doubt they made all that money back and then some, but the point here is that big publishers and developers are pouring tons of cash into games that have very little content beyond Multiplayer.

They throw ridiculous amounts of cash into these games for diminishing returns in content and value. This is a self defeating business model, and it is not up to the customers to pay for that. Big publishers are more than capable of making money. Seeing a publisher fail is due to their own stupidity (Read: THQ). Used sales and Piracy are scapegoats. Period.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

Prices of Video games for the NES in 1989 ranged between $30 and $70, with most sitting around the $50 mark. See here: http://www.salzmafia.com/uploaded_images/GamePro_Issue006_February_1990-092-791162.jpg. In today's dollars, those prices would be $55 to $128

Yet today, most xBox360 games cost between $20 and $60 if you exclude special editions and the like. That means the most common price today is only a few bucks more than the lowest prices in 1989.

Here's your swords and sorcery game from 1989: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Ironsword.png

Here's your swords and sorcery game from 2012
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/121/1217313/the-witcher-2-assassins-of-kings-20120126092508666.jpg

Yeah, game companies are *so* ripping us off when they continue to charge us about the same amount as they were charging for the bargain titles some 20 years ago.

On the other hand, in the NES era, the game market was several times smaller than the current one. Companies were happy when they sold over 50.000 copies.
Now some publisher cry, blame and calls out everyone that they sold just 1 million (1.000.000) copies of a crappy game.

Add to that the cost of expensive cartridges. DVD's cost ~30 cent for me. I bet that they get them even cheaper.

A small market means higher prices because you have to earn the same from a smaller number of sold items. A big market on the other hand means lower prices because you can easily earn much more thanks to several times bigger sales number.

And lets not forget that even tho the prices of games were bigger than the current one, the prices of other stuff were much lower so people had some extra cash to spend. With increased prices of food, education, cars, taxes for every fucking thing that exist (you killed a fly? Well sir, you have to pay for a licence for killing them. Just 199.99$), renting an apartment and God forbids thinking about buying it or a house. And yeah, the important, jet extremely expensive health care (pray to God that you don't need to go to a dentist).

People earned less in the old days, but they needed even much less to live. Everyone with a regular job had some extra cash left at the end of the month. Now? If you have the average salary, you will have some problems.

Also, all your arguments are invalid now.

 

[isometry]

N64 games cost $70. SEVENTY FUCKING DOLLARS. This was more than 15 years ago. Since then, the prices of food and fuel have sky-rocketed. The cost of living, especially in dev hotspots on the coasts, is through the roof. Consider also the dev costs given the massive leaps in complexity and graphics since the 90s. It now costs tens of millions of dollars to push out a AAA title. Sure, the sales are greater (for SOME games), but enough to counter the now massive overhead costs?

Yeah that's completely right. In fact prices peaked a few years earlier with the SNES, Donkey Kong Country was $90, Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG were each $80.

Adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing game of all time is still Super Mario Bros 3. It sold for $50 in 1989, and adjusted for inflation it made over $1.7 billion in 2011 dollars. No other game comes close.

These days most new PC games are discounted to $20 within 6 months after release. The time we are in now is as cheap as gaming has ever been, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Depulcator]

Make your game worth my money and this would not be a problem.

 

[Something Amyss]

One of the funny things here is that single player gamers are among the fastest to depreciate in price. I don't know what they're talking about, since games without robust multiplayer are the only ones I don't have to wait long to see get a price drop, allowing me new purchases at a loss for the retailer. In fact, the retailer is the ONLY one who loses there.

There are rare exceptions, like some of Nintendo's big titles or niche titles like Dynasty Warriors, but the games that encourage used sales are the multiplayer ones.

You do know WHY people wait to buy used don't you?

Because ponies?

 

[Astoria]

It's the just the typical blame game isn't. They have to know that one of the main reasons people buy used is because new games are expensive but they jusst refuse to lower the price even though if you do the math they'd probably make more money if they sold games at a reasonable price. Guess they only see the option that makes them the most amount of money which is getting used games banned and keeping prices as they are.

And would they stop throwing this 'we don't make enough money anymore so we can't make games as good' bullshit excuse at us. Indy game devolopers seem to do just fine without huge amounts of money so you can too.

 

[Something Amyss]

Yeah that's completely right. In fact prices peaked a few years earlier with the SNES, Donkey Kong Country was $90, Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG were each $80.

Of course, this is not factoring the cost of manufacture, something discs were supposed to (and did) cut down on drastically and the fact that those prices peaked because of manufacturing costs on cartridges at the time.

It's funny how people always say "adjusted for inflation, games should cost X" and ignore any practical factors.

Hell, the manufacture part of the process is cheaper than ever due to the ubiquity of CD and DVD manufacturing and the lack of need for proprietary formats. The one exception is Blu Ray (sort of), and for some reason we don't pay more for a Playstation 3 version of a game.

So yeah, factoring inflation and NOTHING ELSE....

Anyway, why don't companies go the "honest" route then, and seek a "fair" price?

There's a reason certain things don't inflate, and it's not hurting the game industry any, either. What is it, a projected tripling of profits in three years? That's pretty damn good.

 

[drummond13]

And yet many single player based games still make massive profits...

"New game prices would have dropped long ago if publishers got a piece of the re-purchase."

I think this is one of the most blatantly untrue things I have ever heard on this website.

 

[duchaked]

at $60 brand new I only buy maybe 1-2 games on day one a year
everything else I just wait :/ and/or rent