PhunkyPhazon said:
And where did this sudden hatred of used games come from, anyways? I don't remember people debating this a year ago.
It's been fairly big in the last couple of years. It's become an issue for two reasons as far as I can tell:
1. The increasingly corperate game industry is not content with it's billions of dollars in profits and has decided to turn it's attention towards things like used games due to the fact that some of the more reality detached bean counters believe that each and every used game sold would be another new game sold that would be going directly into their coffers if the used game market was out there.
2. The increasingly corperate game industry has realized that digital distribution is a wonderful way for them to make even more money. The big problem to this is that it has next to no benefits for the consumers. They get tight control over their products, and to cut out all the espense of shipping, packaging, manufacturing, and similar things. Consumers lose having their disc in hand and the abillity to install and play a 20 year old game if the desire strikes them. Something which is increasingly anathema to an industry that has realized how much money can be made by reselling the same products to a nostolgia crowd. Did the download service you bought from stop supporting the game, or go out of business 10 years ago? No problem, we'll now sell you a new copy of what you already paid for....
Used games being one of the major obstacles to this because that same power that lets someone replay a game by holding onto their disc, also means that people can re-sell that game used. A lot of people get by on playing the high prices by simply trading in games they are done with so someone else can pick them up cheaply down the road. The abillity to trade in your games to cut the costs being one of the major advantages to physical media. Kill the used game trade, and the obstacle of trade in incentives also goes away.
At least that is how I see things.
At any rate, with the game industry on a major push, it's also investing a lot of money to hire game journalists and gaming personalities to promote it's agenda. Sort of like how the industry buys game reviews, which has lead to things like the whole "Gerstmann scandal". Like any kind of media saturation when the target audience is bombarded they gradually begin to think that the point of view expressed is right because *everyone* seems to be saying that, and so do all the statistics and such that those people tend to put forward.
The game industry has gotten big enough where the critics and personalities that had been keeping them in check through criticism, have arguably become their weapon due to the power of the allmighty dollar. After all if your in an industry worth billions, you can afford to pay some well liked nerd so much money his head will spin, and turn him into your mouthpiece to convert other game nerds.
At one time "Penny Arcade" was a sort of edgy, irreverant fringe thing, but today it's become a big business that still tries and banks off of that reputation and the personalities involved. While still funny, it isn't what it used to be, and things like "PAX" and how big and industry supported they are sort of demonstrate that. It only makes sense that the guys in "Penny Arcade" would be ultimatly siding with the industry on things like this, as opposed to the best interests of the gaming public as a whole.
I argue various facets of this entire thing all the time (and occasionally exchange posts with The Escapist's own John Funk in debate), but you'll notice that Penny Arcade is invoking the image of the "poor game developer" who needs your money. Getting beyond the entire question of how much that "poor guy" may or may not make (which will see no resolution here, speaking from previous experience) the industry itself is worth billions. Now that it's rich and powerful we're supposed to feel sorry for it? If the game devs are so poor give them some of the money from the "media blitz" fund instead of using it to whine about how pathetic they are. What's more, developers rarely make any money off their games directly, rather they get paid as the games are being designed. The people who make the money are the producers, they give money to the developers who get paid from the production budget to produce the game which the producer then sells in an effort to make more money than he paid the developers. Now, in some cases things are a bit differant where a developer borrows money to make a game, or is large and corperate enough (as is increasingly common) where it acts as it's own producer. Borrowing money is always a risky proposition, you roll the dice you take your chances, and if your self-producing, that right there means your rolling in so much bloody dough to begin with that you can't expect me to take you seriously. I mean a company that can invest a hundred million dollars in a project isn't exactly on the "Les Miserabes" pity scale.
All the differant forms of investment have been going on this long, and the industry has been booming. The used game market simply represents what some see as an untapped source of more money (if they can kill it), and/or an inconvient obstacle in the way of things like "dighital distribution" and all the cash goodness that could bring if pesky consumers would just stop worrying about their own best interests and brainlessly fork over the money like good cashbags.
That's how I see it at any rate, and why it's been a fairly recent development.
In the end today's game industry isn't just about making a profit, but about greedily sucking every dime it can out of customers. Pretty much everything it does or develops from DLC, to server fees, is all a matter of how they can exploit the customer today. Especially when customers don't look back on things that have always been provided for free (like multiplayer) and put their foot down on "why should we have to pay for this now?, why was maintaining a server not an issue for the last couple of decades?".
I for one have no real guilt over calling it how I see it, and I figure the more we gamers sit back and take it, the worse it's going to get. I am seriously hoping that before too long people wise up and start not buying games (no matter how good looking) until things improve in general, and the industry backs waaaay off on issues like used game sales.
Right now the only industry source I trust is the fictional "Ryan Quickbender" I mean he's more honest than even Penny Arcade at least, starting his commentary "Greetings Cashbags".
