Lionhead: "Piracy these days on PC is probably less problematic than second-hand sales on the Xbox"

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Katana314

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AWKWARD LOGIC TIME!
I think people being brutally murdered in alleyways behind GameStop for their copy of the game is FAR more important, and has FAR higher impact than either piracy or used game sales. Why? Because it's much more illegal than either one.

Ok, speaking realistically...I'm not going to call either piracy or used games "good", but this is sort of the advent that they're both bad.
 

Darth Sea Bass

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j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
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.
Couldn't have said it any better my self!
 

Ranorak

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I don't get 2 things about the people against second hand sales.

1) Stop using the word developers. There are some exceptions but mostly the money of sales go to Publishers, who in turn pay Developers.

2) What do you think game shops use the money they make of used sales for?!
Golden toilets?
No, they use that money to buy more games to sell in their store.
More money to gameshops = more money to buy more games from Publishers = more money for publishers = more games.
 

Rednog

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Ranorak said:
lunncal said:
Morally, they are exactly the same as far as I'm concerned. Either way you're getting the game without having to pay the publisher. You can say that second hand sales are better overall for the industry because someone bought the game originally, but the actual act of buying a game used has the exact same effect on developers as pirating one.

Saying "Someone else has already bought this, so it doesn't matter." when buying a used game is no better than any of excuses pirates have. Yes, someone else paid the developer for the game, but you did not. Yet you still get to play the game.
The way I see it,
If there is a game collecting dust on my shelf because I don't play it anymore and I give it away for free, I'm robbing the developers too, right?
In your eyes it's morally wrong to give something away that you don't use.
Because the person I give it too will no longer buy that item from a store.
You know, the store that ALREADY paid to developer for the product.

Lets take a hypothetical here.
A gameshop buys 100 copies of Halo Scrolls: Call of Warcraft.
They have to pay the Publisher say 5000 Euro. That's 10 euro less then each individual game sells for.
So for every sale, the store gets to keep 10 euro profit while the other 50 has already been used to buy the games in the first place.

Now, I buy a game, for 60 Euro. The store gets their 60 euro and they have money to buy more stocks in the future. More people do this, and they sell about 80 copes of the game.
They still have 20 unsold copies in their shop. Already paid for. A few months pass and they lower the price. 50 Euro's for a game. No profit, but at least we'll run even. and Yes, all other copies get sold.

meanwhile I finished Halo Scrolls: Call of Warcraft and sold it back to The Gameshop for a neat 20 Euro's. They sell the game for 25 Euro's as a sold copy. Making a 5 euro profit.

In the end, they made a cool 15 euro profit on 1 game.
There were also 3 other people that did the same thing as me.

Now, it's next year, Halo Scrolls: Fable of Zelda comes out, and because of the extra profit made with the sale of used games, they now buy 101 copies of it to sell in their store.

See, this is how the actual trade goes.
When you buy a game, the store already paid for it. Your 60 Euro doesn't get split into 10 for the store and 50 goes in a neat envelope to Nintenvison. More store profit means more games can be bought by the store to sell.
My biggest problem with this argument is that you're saying that the retail store is only making a small profit on each game. There are no stores that are silly enough to buyback a game for 20 euro and sell it for only 25 euro (actually I don't know if that is true, but I know that doesn't hold up in the US).
I've worked in a gamestop (it has been a few years, but I'm sure things still work the same), we would get people selling back games on day 2 of the release. The payback for most games would be like $35 or so, and then we'd slap a stick on it for $55. $5 less than the retail of $60. And Gamestop made us actively push the used games over the retail ones. And this is where I think the gaming industry has a problem, the used copy is in direct competition with the retail copy, and the general public generally doesn't care to make a distinction because videogames generally doesn't suffer the wear and tear/ deprecation that other used items do. Hell most people are like "I save $5, hell yea give me that", the only thing that deters some people is the word used, but even then most companies won't even call their games used anymore, they call it previously viewed, or refurbished.
Used game sales are a billion dollar industry, this isn't chump change we are talking about, if it was such a small thing you wouldn't be seeing every other company trying to start their own used sales division. They are making a large profit by directly competing with new sales and undercutting the new sales.
Sure it might be a different case with older games, but like I said I think the problem is that game companies are talking about games that are newer releases.
 

Vibhor

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I think someone said it better so amma quote him
"Make your game worth 60$ or fuck off"
I don't even know who would pirate fable 3. This comment by the devs seems more like a marketing campaign and less like a rant. I mean, its fable 3 we are talking about. They know that people know their games suck so they are trying to get more sales by these acts.
 

DanDanikov

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A lot of people bring up the illegality question, but I think that's rather moot. Regardless as to whether it's legal or not, it's something that could affect sales and therefore has financial impact. I think the question for companies is far more practical: how much money am I actually losing? How much does it cost to change that (including non-financial costs to the company's reputation when DRM is poorly implemented and/or recieved)?

A lot of what I hear on the subject is rhetoric on who's in the right/wrong. Some companies seem to use piracy as a scapegoat for a variety of ills, or buy into the hype and implement poorly considered countermeasures. I've yet to see significant, well thought out research that considers the entirely of the problem correctly, nor do I think there's any individual right answer for every developer out there.

I do think that for the larger developers such as Lionhead, used games is far more likely to be an issue than piracy, especially on consoles where piracy is that bit more involved an activity and has higher risks (such as the black-listing of your console). It's where they think they're losing the most money, so you can't blame them for being more concerned about it.
 

Katana314

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Ranorak said:
I don't get 2 things about the people against second hand sales.

1) Stop using the word developers. There are some exceptions but mostly the money of sales go to Publishers, who in turn pay Developers.

2) What do you think game shops use the money they make of used sales for?!
Golden toilets?
No, they use that money to buy more games to sell in their store.
More money to gameshops = more money to buy more games from Publishers = more money for publishers = more games.
They're often using that money internally, for more self-advertising, having publishers promote their store for games (Buy at GameStop and receive a free Disc One Nuke!), etc.

If there were no used games at stores like GameStop, they'd hardly go out of business; all their sales would just come from new games, which they make plenty of money off of.

I'm not sure what point you're making off of from "where the money technically goes". The money you give the store goes to the cash register. The person who runs the cash register, in turn, pays the bank, which then pays the corporate GameStop account. They, in turn, send payments to the publisher for new games, and to the government, to pay sales tax. The publisher, in turn, rewards the developer with a cash bonus if there have been a high number of sales. Every company involved (from GameStop local to GameStop corporate to the publisher to the bank to the government to the developer) also pays all of their employees.

So you see; anytime someone says "When you buy a game, the money goes to X." where X is a single entity, they could not be more wrong. It's unlikely any single entity will see much more than $10 of that.
 

Arehexes

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I'm pro pirate mostly because you can discover new games you would have never bought. Example I saw disgaea on the psp and thought it was stupid, a week later I bought Jenna D'arc and hated it so I tried disgaea 1 after downloading it. Seeing how great it was I rushed to gamestop to exchange the games. Same went for Etrian Odyssey for the DS, I really hated First Person RPGs but I downloaded it tried it and loved it. Now I feel like I'm an exception to pirates cause I only keep games I already own (that and it's useful to have 70+ DS games on one cart instead of having to carry them all).
 

idarkphoenixi

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Seems to me like it's exactly the same thing really.
Either way, Lionhead won't make a profit off it.
 

David Bray

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Ranorak said:
David Bray said:
No, because the 25 Euro the retailer makes doesn't go in their pockets all together.
It goes into buying more games from the Publishers (Not developers damnit) to sell in their store.

Increased income for stores doesn't translated into profit.
They use that increased income to buy more stock from Publishers to sell!
THat's pretty cool, but they ain't making zip or they wouldn't do it at all. They're probably making at least 20% profit from that price
 

BloodSquirrel

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j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
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.
I've been saying something very close to this for a while now:

If you create game that can be finished in an afternoon, don't be surprised when someone sells it to recoup some of the cost. When you see used games on sale 2-3 days after launch you shouldn't be thinking "Man, those are going to sell to people who should be buying new copies!" it should be "Would that person really have spent $60 on my game if it was only going to interest him for 2 days and he couldn't sell it?"

Also, this is the side effect for going after the broadest market possible. There are more potential buyers there, but they're also less dedicated fans. They're less likely to buy new launch day and more likely to sell the game later.

I also think it's funny that developers are busy making their games as easy as possible with the result that people are blowing through them and selling them that much faster.
 

DaMullet

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?????????

You people make no sense.

Because something is legal that makes is perfectly okay for everyone? And if something is illegal you must purge it from this world?

Does that mean cigarettes are healthy for you and everyone while smoking pot kills kittens?

Saying that the laws that we have right now are perfect is so... shallow thinking. How many times have laws changed over the course of history? It was illegal for women to vote remember? That changed, because there was a problem with the law.

I'm not saying that piracy should be made legal, but it should be the law that the IP owner of a game should get some sort of profit from any sale from the game.

So if a developer gets $10 for a $60 game, they should still get $1.67 if someone sells that game for $10.

There, done. Problem solved. Now buying and selling repeatedly one copy of a game leads to developers getting lots of money so they can afford to hire things like... good voice actors for example! :)
 

newwiseman

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I've always been a fan of buying a game a few months after release when the price drops, it's not second hand, it's not pirated, it's not $60 for 10hours of play.

Random of topic note, Portal 2 had the fastest drop in price I've ever less than a month after release you could get the PC version new for $20 and XBOX new for $30.
 

Hristo Tzonkov

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Only poor countries pirate.Let's be honest on this.Most of those guys wouldn't even be able to buy the game.But a person who could afford it would rather buy it second hand because it's cheaper.Which really harms the industry?
 

Madman123456

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I don't get why anyone would even calculate second hand sale as a loss. My Car is.. erm, lemme look it up... in fifth hand. The company which built this thing still exists.

With Games, this could be even "worse". Any new game is made to fit onto the current console generation and the older games are in no way generally worse then the newer ones. My Car was cheap and i have to care about rust here and there and certain parts are getting really old. Also, i don't have many of the fancy extras newer cars have.

With games, the older ones are just as good as the new ones. No expensive parts will fall off due to rust and old age.

When i do buy a game used, i do not appreciate being told that i'm part of a problem the gaming industry has.

I see the Problem they have with Gamestop, since this is a company that basically leeches on the used sales. I do not see a problem with used games in general.

I buy the game and i should be able to sell it whenever and to whomever i see fit. Maybe i'll use the money i get from selling old games to buy something new.

Despite this, i'm okay with steam. I know in advance that i wont be able to sell this game, so i do my research and play demos. If the game can entertain me for at least 100 hours, i got my moneys worth out of that and when i get bored with it afterwards i have no problem having it sit in my account, unused.



Almost the entire games industry is pissing me off. Describing what is my perfectly legal right as a "Problem" that is apparently bigger then a felony is just another punch in the face of the consumer.
After pissing all over the PC market with ludicrous and in some cases illegal copy Protection (seriously, the state of the PC market is caused by the industry.) most potential customers wont bother anymore instead of buying a console. The next big game sells poorly on PC and the pirates are blamed again. Most customers wouldn't even bother to get some of the games for free, but whatever, the evil pirates are to blame.
The fact that with certain games, any virus you'll get from torrent downloads is removed easier then invasive copy protection has nothing to do with it. The fact that PC ports very poor for the most part and you'll have to download usermade patches to make the game playable, which the copy protection will then prevent doesn't have anything to do with this either.


My point is: the industry has made most of their pirates themselves. The "moral" option would be to buy a game and then download a playable version of the game you just bought. Otherwise you'll have problems with the software.
 

veloper

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Typical for Lionhead to be the last ones to figure things out.

The rest of us already figured this years ago.
 

DEAD34345

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Ranorak said:
The way I see it,
If there is a game collecting dust on my shelf because I don't play it anymore and I give it away for free, I'm robbing the developers too, right?
In your eyes it's morally wrong to give something away that you don't use.
Because the person I give it too will no longer buy that item from a store.
You know, the store that ALREADY paid to developer for the product.

Lets take a hypothetical here.
A gameshop buys 100 copies of Halo Scrolls: Call of Warcraft.
They have to pay the Publisher say 5000 Euro. That's 10 euro less then each individual game sells for.
So for every sale, the store gets to keep 10 euro profit while the other 50 has already been used to buy the games in the first place.

Now, I buy a game, for 60 Euro. The store gets their 60 euro and they have money to buy more stocks in the future. More people do this, and they sell about 80 copes of the game.
They still have 20 unsold copies in their shop. Already paid for. A few months pass and they lower the price. 50 Euro's for a game. No profit, but at least we'll run even. and Yes, all other copies get sold.

meanwhile I finished Halo Scrolls: Call of Warcraft and sold it back to The Gameshop for a neat 20 Euro's. They sell the game for 25 Euro's as a sold copy. Making a 5 euro profit.

In the end, they made a cool 15 euro profit on 1 game.
There were also 3 other people that did the same thing as me.

Now, it's next year, Halo Scrolls: Fable of Zelda comes out, and because of the extra profit made with the sale of used games, they now buy 101 copies of it to sell in their store.

See, this is how the actual trade goes.
When you buy a game, the store already paid for it. Your 60 Euro doesn't get split into 10 for the store and 50 goes in a neat envelope to Nintenvison. More store profit means more games can be bought by the store to sell.
First of all, I never said buying games used was morally wrong, I said it is morally exactly the same as pirating a game. Either way people get the game for "free" in terms of money going to the developer.

What you have to remember is that if 50% of the sales of a game are used, then a store only has buy 50% as many games from the developer, thus the developer only gets 50% as much money. If all of the people who were going to buy used instead bought new, then the shop would have to buy twice as many games in the first place, since none of them would be given back for resell. Effectively every used copy of a game that is sold, is a theoretical "lost sale" for the developer.

Remember where else you have heard the words "lost sale"? How about every piracy argument ever. Buying a game used has the exact same effect on the developer as pirating a game (one theoretical "lost sale" for the developer). I consider 2 things that achieve the exact same effect to be morally equal, whether one is illegal or not.

The only way it is different is that one gives money to game retailers, and if you really think that incentivising the retailers to carry on cutting the profits of developers is helping the industry, then go ahead. I do not think that helps the game industry in any way, but I can understand it as a justification if you think that these programs have a positive effect on the industry overall, which is very debatable.
 

Andrew_C

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@Dastardly :
Thanks for your answer, you have given be much to think about. I didn't realise some shops inflate the price of 2nd hand games so much. The ones near me aren't as blatant as that (no Gamestops), but thinking about it they do charge a lot for 2nd hand console games. I'm primarily PC gamer and don't buy many second hand games so i hadn't really noticed.