Obsidian Hopes "Digital Distribution Stabs the Used Game Market in the Heart"

[Vyper1X]

Maybe if Obsidian made a decent game for once there wouldn't be so many pre-owned versions of their games floating around.

 

[Worgen]

You can go as digital as you want, just give up making full price for your games, I have allot of games on my steam but only like 3 of them were bought for full price and 2 of those are from valve, the rest are all on sales for cheap as hell.

Well then there's their next target, isn't it. If games are sold at a discount, they're not getting as much money as they can, therefore stealing the discounted part of the price.

Hey, don't look at me like that, it's their logic.

So, your saying that piracy is the only option left?

 

[cefm]

Dummy - someone has to BUY your game first before it can become "used". And if you make a good game it won't appear on the "used" market for a long time. Remember how hard it was to find a used copy of HALO for the first couple years after it came out? If you could find one it was almost retail price due to demand.

The only time you actually LOSE retail sales to the used game market in the same year you release the game is if you make a crap product that isn't worth the money you charged for it. That means the consumer not only doesn't want to play it anymore, but they really want some money back from it because they feel ripped off.

 

[mjc0961]

Though obviously they have little in common from an ethical perspective, the end result is very similar; the publisher is cut out of the sales loop.

Not entirely. At least with used game sales, stores like GameStop have to spend some of that money they made selling used games on buying new titles when they launch to have stock of those for people who want them new. Thus, money is going back into the industry. Compare this to piracy which is just selfish douchebags not supporting the industry in any good way and not putting any money at all into the machine.

Not to mention that stores that aren't GameStop have these thing called 'sales' which frequently include new games.

The EB games that I go to (owned by gamestop) has daily sales. I remember going in one day and seeing L.A. Noir on sale for like $30 a couple months after it came out. When I went in to buy the MGS HD collection they had duke nukem forever for 75% off.

And which version is on sale? New, or used? Because if it's the used ones and not the new ones, you're pretty much proving what Satsuki was saying: that GameStop doesn't have sales on NEW games.

 

[CM156_v1legacy]

Though obviously they have little in common from an ethical perspective, the end result is very similar; the publisher is cut out of the sales loop.

Not entirely. At least with used game sales, stores like GameStop have to spend some of that money they made selling used games on buying new titles when they launch to have stock of those for people who want them new. Thus, money is going back into the industry. Compare this to piracy which is just selfish douchebags not supporting the industry in any good way and not putting any money at all into the machine.

Not to mention that stores that aren't GameStop have these thing called 'sales' which frequently include new games.

The EB games that I go to (owned by gamestop) has daily sales. I remember going in one day and seeing L.A. Noir on sale for like $30 a couple months after it came out. When I went in to buy the MGS HD collection they had duke nukem forever for 75% off.

And which version is on sale? New, or used? Because if it's the used ones and not the new ones, you're pretty much proving what Satsuki was saying: that GameStop doesn't have sales on NEW games.

The gamestop near me had a sale on new copies of DNF a while back. Same goes for new copies of Alpha Protocol even further back.

 

[ShadowKirby]

I think some of you guys need to make the distinction between buying a game and selling it back to your friend and buying a game, sell it back to Gamestop who will give you 5$ (you have to use back at their store so money never leaves their pocket really), and then will sell it back at 40$, making a 35$ profit of a game they had to buy once from the publisher and already made some profit from selling new.

The problem is not you selling what you own. The problem is an entire company revenue model built around profiting from the multiple sells of something they only had to buy once, cutting money from the publishers and developers pockets.

 

[AnarchistFish]

>Environmentally conscious
>Doesn't want games to be re-used

 

[Strazdas]

Cutting publisher out of the loop? isnt that what we should encourage, you know, actually playing the developer and not let some people get rich just on marketing?

 

[Epona]

It's getting to the point where I'm wanting to buy all of my games used just to spite these greedy bastards in the industry.

If the game is USED, it's already been SOLD, and you've already made your PROFIT. Shut your festering gob, you tit.

These days I always check Gamestop FIRST before I buy a new game. I would rather give them the money than a company who would rather take away my right to resale my own property. Even if it's only a $10 savings (the Power Up card makes a $55 game a $50 game).

Just last night I bought 3 games used, it was buy 2 get one free. Is Obsidian going to offer deals like that?

 

[Erttheking]

Sounds like someone is leaning on the "it's all about me" button.

 

[risenbone]

Stupid thing is they already have a system to stop second hand sales or at least limit them severly. It's a model thats worked for the PC game market for about 3 decades and it's called DRM.

 

[Vykrel]

yeah, well the problem is that digitally distributed games dont seem to go down in price.

 

[Renco van der Tang]

I think the fundamental flaw in his thinking is that he seems to believe that every second hand sale is lost income for the publisher and developer.
When someone buys a second hand car, it's not (just) because they want to save money, but more often than not it is because they simply can't *afford* to buy a car that suits their needs as new. I see games as similar in this regard. Pricing vs. quality drives gamers towards second hand and piracy for the most part, not because gamers are stingy, but because the average income simply can't afford to purchase all those hot new titles at new prices.

 

[U2K]

Hey Obsidian if you love Steam so much then why don't you ask Lucas Arts to get KOTOR2 on it? Pretty please?

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

The car industry is not the gaming industry. The Gaming industry is highly dependent on the new sales. It has no guarantee of profit at all. My article pointed that out.

You can apply your senseless logic to any industry in the world. No one has a guaranteed profit. But can you explain why the gaming industry is among the most lucrative industries in the past 10 years despite used sales market? And how do you explain that console market is more profitable than PC market where you can't buy used games? You can't. So don't try to justify your plain wrong logic. This isn't about profit. Companies have more than enough profit. This is about greed. It's never enough for these assholes. And once the used games market is destroyed you will realize why you were wrong. If publishers and developers want to stop used game sales they don't have to do it at the expense of customers. Let people buy and sell used games among themselves and find a way to stop stores like Gamestop from doing it on a massive scale. Otherwise the whole anti-used game sales will collapse on gaming industry.

 

[aiusepsi]

I wish this thread was shorter just because I can't read the whole thing, but ShadowKirby has it absolutely right, as does someone else in this thread.

The difference between games and many other products is that a used game is pretty much as good as a new game, in terms of use, whereas a used car is demonstrably worse than a new one; it's deteriorated. So it makes sense to discount a used car, to account for the deterioration. Discounting a used game makes it clearly better than a new one, apart from ill-defined reasons of not wanting to own something someone else has owned before.

Also, the stores make a ton of profit on used sales. They would much, much rather you buy a discounted used game because they make a ton more money on it. That's not capital that they re-invest in new games, because they make profit selling new games too. It's just profit that ends up on their balance sheets; the difference between the price they buy games for and the price they sell it at just goes straight into their pocket.

A lot of people mention that they dislike greed; what we're seeing here is pure, unrestricted greed on the part of retailers. That developers, lest we forget, the people who sweat for two years or more to actually make the games, want some of the cream that the retailers are skimming off is not that unreasonable.

 

[THEoriginalBRIEN]

Ever since I got a computer that can actually run newer games, I completely stopped buying used games, which were the only games I bought (for PS3). If Steam keeps giving me games with a $30-$60 pricetag for $10 or less, I don't see any need to go back to Gamestop's BTGO sales.

 

[Irridium]

i don't see the problem with preowned games being sold.
we do it with everything else so why not games?

Real answer (that they won't just come out and say): "We're trying to expand our profit base to avoid the "make a mega-hit or die" situation we've found ourselves in as publishers; to put it bluntly, we need more money."

Sad corollary to this: If people have to pay full price and can't trade in old games for new ones, fewer games will be bought. Any potential gains seen by the publishers will be minor and not enough to stave off disaster.

Horse shit. Any people who won't buy if they can't then resell the game are people who would then lead to at least one more lost sale through used games, making it moot. People who sell old to buy new do not help the developers long term, thats a purely short term thing. Getting rid of preowned will only help them. This isn't an economics, its basic algebra. If you cost them three sales through trading in used games to buy one new, thats not a good thing for them.

Now now, my friend, there's no need to get uppity and use naughty words. What about when you have old games that you no longer wish to play? The used game market allows you to sell the game then to put towards a new game.

1. That isn't what the argument is about here. He's saying that Developers need used game sales, I say thats complete bollocks. 2. If that were the extent of it there wouldn't be a problem. zthe problem is people selling their games off even if they aren't old.

If people are selling their game that soon, it's likely because they didn't like it, or because they finished it and have no desire to replay it. They're exercising their consumer rights by reselling it. Consumer rights are a good thing, my friend.

Amazing how game companies managed to convince so many people to hate one of the last rights they have left, isn't it?

 

[Kargathia]

i don't see the problem with preowned games being sold.
we do it with everything else so why not games?

I'd just like to declare a blanket "Ceteris Paribus" on the following passage:

For most goods, the status of being 'used' denotes a degredation of quality from the original product. A used car will require more maintainance than a new one, making it harder to keep running for as long; used clothes will be more faded and threadbare, making them less comfortable to wear; used books yellow and lose their bindings with age, thus becoming marginally less pleasant to read. All of these decrease the economic utility of the product, thus forcing the distributer to decrease his price if he wants somebody to buy it.

With digital media, however, this is significantly less of an issue. The consumer is primarily concerned with the data on the disk, not the disk itself: so long as the disk plays, it's just as good as a brand new one. There's the chance that the disk won't play due to negligence on the part of the previous owner, but stores like Gamestop typically have a trade in policy that allows substitutions in this scenario. So long as the threshod of "being readable" is passed, a used disk can last just as long as a new one, providing that the owner does not do something mind-boggingly stupid. Thus, the economic utility of a new and used disk are roughly the same.

So we have two products, each with roughly the same value to the consumer, with one offered for a slightly lower price. Naturally, the consumer is going to tend towards purchasing the cheaper good. Hence the hullabaloo.

Correct, but only half. Economics recognises two kinds of degradation: physical - as described by you, and economic - which means that the more potential upgrades are available, the less the product is worth. It also applies to a product being in fashion.

In theory that means that the drop in cost is justified by customers not being able to purchase the product on launch.

In practice it seems there is a bit of a gulf between developer and consumer expectation of the product. The developer thinks of himself as selling a one-time experience, one that will be set aside as soon as the credits roll. The consumer expects to be buying a longer term product, and assigns a price to replay value.

I can't honestly state that either side is right or wrong, but in the end I'm still a consumer, and will side accordingly.