bahumat42 said:
joe-h2o said:
I take it you also think the used book market "severely damages" the publishing industry, and that the used car market and used housing markets also "severely damage" those industries?
The game companies (or I suppose, the publishers that own them) complain about used sales as "lost revenue", but that's simply disingenuous. The reason that the used market is as big as it is is because of the high cost of new games. Certainly the costs of development are high, but when a AAA title can have *millions* spent on it and then *still* turn out a mediocre to poor product, then yes - people are going to complain. Especially if they buy it at the full price.
I'm amused that you equate the practice with theft, since that's the sort of rhetoric that the music industry uses, and the movie industry did (especially around the time when the VCR was invented - they tried to lobby to prevent the sale of VCRs to consumers, arguing that it would destroy the movie industry, only to later discover that they made more money selling VHS copies of movies in stores).
The game industry has backed itself into this corner - games are very expensive, and are often poor showings for the price asked (even with the gigantic budgets). They need to address why so many people find second hand games so attractive - value for money. Brand new games simply do not provide that, with a few notable exceptions.
Go make yourself a dunce hat and sit in the corner.
NONE of the industries you mentioned are comparable to games.
1) books, its simple, low risk, low break even book, we are tallking less than 100k in sales is a success. To write, edit, print and distribute a book costs very little, also remember, books don't really advertise, theres no big release expenditure, it is literally just the writing editing and printing costs.
2) Cars have a higher unit cost because there is component cost involved, so they put a fair margin on each one and end up in the green. And a used car is always worse than a new one go on say the same about games, i dare you.
3) Housing is paid for by the first time buyer, again its a labour and resource cost. Its a fundamentally different system.
I mean the closest you can really get to games is films and even they have 3 teirs of income vs games one (cinema,television/plane syndication, dvd). We are our own industry and have our own problems, and need solutions that fit, atm thats dlc, but as infrastructure and interconnectivity increase in size speed and reliability there will be a shift to always online drm, and the big shocker is because of the increased reliability nobody will really notice. Now it won't happen yet, but it will happen eventually. And we will be better for it, PC gaming is on average 25% cheaper for a new game and for an old game the prices drop quicker and lower than console counterparts.
Food for thought. Although your probably just going to start flaming because "I WANT MAH RIGHHTS" rather than whats good for you.
Goodness me, would you like some back support for that chip on your shoulder?
You claim the games industry has nothing in common with any of the industries I have listed, but you're ignoring the biggest and simplest criterion common to all business ventures: the requirement for a sustainable business model. To put it another way, (and I have already, but people keep ignoring it because it's convenient), your product needs to provide value for money such that the sales outweigh the expenses.
You dismiss the three industries I mention out of hand because the products are not identical to games, but it's very short sighted.
As it stands right now, many game titles are not value for money. You can try and reframe the argument all you want that "games cost a lot of money to make, and therefore it's necessary to charge $60 for them to recover the costs", but my approach would be to look at it from the other side - if it costs that much to make a game then the model is simply unsustainable in the long term.
To bring it back to cars, since you're so convinced the business models are not the same, we'll look at a hypothetical new car. Let's also make it an electric car so that it has one really big, expensive component that is not fully "mature" yet (for example, compared to being able to build using aluminium, or high economy ICE, fully computerised systems etc that are mature and relatively cheap for manufacturers) - the traction battery.
Now, the car company wants to sell this car for $x thousand since that is the price the market will bear. Pricing it higher than that means that consumers *simply will not buy it* on a large scale - ie, on a scale that ensures your product line is profitable. Sure, you'll always sell some to people who want one and who aren't really concerned about the cost, but you can't build a business on those people.
Now imagine that it's a little along the road (ha!) and the car has been out for a year or so. It still costs a lot to make the car, but now used sales are undercutting them - do they whine that second hand sales are undercutting their business? (Perhaps, but that does not get away from the fact that if your product is not value for money, people will look elsewhere to obtain it if they want it but cannot afford it, or they'll simply not buy at all)
This all boils down to sustainable business models, and the games industry is not immune to it. Nor can it dictate the market price in reverse and whine when people claim it is too expensive. If your new games are not value for money then *reduce the budget that goes into them* in the first place.
No other business would get away with having a gigantic budget for what are often mediocre products and then blaming the poor sales[1] on the fact that people can simply by a second hand product.
You've spent time in this thread "schooling" people on how business works, yet you seem to be missing the very first lesson.
[1] I'd also make the claim that games companies have little to complain about in the first place given how profitable the publishers that own them are, but they simply want more, more, more and take the attitude "how dare people buy our product second hand and not pay us!" .
