Developers Inventing New Ways to Fight Used Game Sales
We’ve known for a long time that game developers in general do not like used game sales but some of the steps they are trying to take now are just crazy. How crazy you ask? Read this:
"I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay $20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free,'" explained Capps to GamesIndustry, explaining one possible strategy that could take form.
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Publish Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:11:00 CST Read more...
They really are throbbers aren't they. There's outrage already over DRM, but they carry on along the same path. Since when has it been good business to drive away your customers in order to prevent loss of profits? It all strikes me as the equivalent of searching people as they leave shops.
buzzmong wrote:Oddly enough, I don't see the music industry or movie industry bitching too hard about secondary sales of cd albums or dvds....I wonder why.
They're all media, once it's been sold at retail once, that's it, publishers/studios have gotten their money, no different for video games really.
I never see pre-owned sections for music or film formats, but there's a massive industry built up around pre-owned games. That's all I meant, without actually making it clear and saying it.
I imagine it's because most people stop playing a game once they've finished it, whereas music and films people tend to go back to. Certainly for music, film I remember seeing a small second hand market for, but people who don't want to watch something more than once will generally rent.
Dog Pants wrote:I imagine it's because most people stop playing a game once they've finished it, whereas music and films people tend to go back to. Certainly for music, film I remember seeing a small second hand market for, but people who don't want to watch something more than once will generally rent.
and with music, there's so much market for it besides direct sales to consumers, so any 2nd hand market there doesn't do much damage, unlike, say piracy.
With games that have an online component, but which don't charge a subscription, there's sometimes a continuing cost to the developer to provide game servers, content hosting or master server browsers, depending on the model. Also some games receive free updates or patches. Owners of second-hand games contribute nothing to this cost, so perhaps they are seeking ways to redress this.
Already games come with non-transferable online keys, which must be really hurting second-hand sales. Publishers probably don't care about this, indeed it saves them money to shorten the lifespan of games by eliminating the second-hand market. Many don't even bother with after-sales support anymore, relying on fan-made forums to do the job for them.
PC Games are a pain in the scrote to support and with the view, rightly or wrongly, that most are extensively pirated are probably seen as a money-sink once they've got the first-quarter sales. Shops like Gamestation see them as a waste of shelf-space even when new, and ones with keys are effectively valueless once the seal is broken. To stay in business, they've shifted wholly to the safer environment of console games, where almost universally the CD is required to play the game.
Now it seems someone wants a piece of that second-hand market pie, but they haven't thought it through. It will cost them more to continue to host the service and process payments than supplying the full product on the disk, and I'm not sure they'll recoup that through the second-hand market, from people who, after all, are buying used games because they are cheaper.
In my opinion Epic are just being stupid whiny cunts like always. I believe they DO get money from rentals, as rental places have to pay some kind of fees to rent stuff out, and as far as re-selling stuff goes, well crap tonnes of products (not just games) get re-sold and the creator of those products doesn't get any extra money, and neither do they bitch and moan. If the money they charge doesn't cover the costs of making it, then raise the price by all means, don't demand that you receive multiple payments for a single copy of something.
Remember a few months ago they were complaining that intel didn't make integrated graphics cards good enough to run Crysis, and that intel are directly responsible for limiting their market since lots of people have PC's with integrated graphics?
Lots of games companies seem to feel the need to look for scapegoats as to why nobody bought their shit game (although not in Crysis's case, it got quite good reviews even though we all hated it).
Plenty of excuses exist for games not doing well, but never before have I seen a company make a game with high requirements and then blame hardware manufacturers for the high requirements limiting their market. Its like manufacturing square tires and then blaming their poor sales on the car industry for only using round wheels.
Developers Inventing New Ways to Fight Used Game Sales
and with music, there's so much market for it besides direct sales to consumers, so any 2nd hand market there doesn't do much damage, unlike, say piracy.
