cookyy2k said:
Cpt Corallis said:
If it is available from a location where the money will in some way end up with the developer, that is where I will buy it from.
Piracy takes that sale and funding away. So I do not pirate.
Probl;em is these second hand sales rarely if atall actually pay anything to the publisher, the game outlet gets all the money.
This is a fallacy. The game outlet gets all the money regardless of whether you buy used or new. Here's how it works: when you buy a brand new game, the retail outlet doesn't take half your money, put it in a pretty envelope with a ribbon on top and send it to the publishers/developers. The reason for this is that the publishers
already got their money when the shop ordered in the games to put on the shelf. Do you think publishers just loan shops their games to display, until they actually get sold? For every game you see on display in a game shop, the publisher was paid. When you buy a new game, the shop uses your money to help recoup the cost of ordering in games in the first place. If a game proves popular, and they sell all their current stock, then they will order in more, and the publisher will get more money. But it all focuses on the shop's expenditure. Even if you buy new, your money is going entirely to the shop.
As for used sales, there's nothing wrong with it. It's a legal market, offers many people with less money to spend the same chance to play games as us, and what many people forget, it is entirely dependent on the first-hand market to get product into circulation anyway. For example, EA may complain about how such-and-such a game didn't do so well because 1 million people bought it second-hand. However, this ignores the fact that for 1 million people to be able to buy the game second-hand, another 1 million people at least
must have bought the game first-hand, then gone on to sell it back to Gamestop. And that ignores entirely the number of people who bought the game at launch and kept hold of it. Sure, occasionally a game will be bought and sold by Gamestop 2 or 3 times over, but these numbers are generally in the minority.
For a game to be have a thriving second-hand market, it must have had at least an initial thriving first-hand market in order to supply it. Games don't magically teleport from the publisher's warehouse to the second-hand section of GAME without any transaction inbetween.
Lastly, if publishers are so worried about second-hand sales, then maybe they should focus on creating games which people will want to hold on to. The reason games are now sold second-hand so much isn't just because of the high cost of each game at launch- it's because publishers and developers have spent so long copying each other, following each other, and sponging off each other that many gamers have now come to see modern games as entirely interchangeable and dispensable. Why
should EA expect someone to not sell their copy of BattleShooter6 when next month is seeing the release of FutureWarSoldier7, and to most people the games are practically identical, differing only in their 'new-ness'. If you've helped create a market where practically all shooters are pretty much the same, then you have no right to complain when someone sells your game to purchase the latest and flashiest one. If you didn't want that to happen, you shouldn't have made a game so samey as everyone elses.
There's a reason games like Shadow Of The Colossus cost a small fortune to buy second-hand off places like Amazon. Games like those are beloved old gems, and people will only part with them for some serious moolah. I am certain that a considerably higher percentage of people who bought SotC kept it than people who bought Black Ops or Fable: The Next One.