This is an interesting angle to the discussion which we hadn't yet broached. Digital distribution, if carried to its logical extreme, would put more than software pirates out of business.Goofonian said:
Team Humidor on Used Games
- Thread starter Russ Pitts
- Start date
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I'm finding it hard to see why Games should be different from any other reusable retail product
For instance I work in the Tyre industry, which surprisingly (now I actually think about it)
draws alot of parallels eg:
someone buys some tyres then trades them in for say a new set of low profile wheels and tyres
there is alot of money in second hand tyres, and yet my company (a very big one even in little old New Zealand) as a manufacturer is not interested, let the independants sell them, they can guarantee them if they like. We are not going to if they are outside our terms of trade, and these are very reasonable for the sake of safety, but even we have to draw the line somewhere.
Likewise with the game industry, They shouldnt be interested in sales that bring a whole new set of headaches, scratched disks, multiplayer games that have had the cd key banned as I've seen happen a few times in BF2 for example.
our motto is you can only sell a tyre once, hopefully we'll never see it again until they want a new one and we'll dispose of it.
I'm all for keeping unnecessary angst out of our business, we made our cut if someone is willing to take the burden of having to deal with the bargain hunters then that person is most welcome to them. In a perfect world give me the flush individual with bags of cash who knows exactly what they want, any day of the week.
Greedy lazy capitalist pig........you'd better believe it
For instance I work in the Tyre industry, which surprisingly (now I actually think about it)
draws alot of parallels eg:
someone buys some tyres then trades them in for say a new set of low profile wheels and tyres
there is alot of money in second hand tyres, and yet my company (a very big one even in little old New Zealand) as a manufacturer is not interested, let the independants sell them, they can guarantee them if they like. We are not going to if they are outside our terms of trade, and these are very reasonable for the sake of safety, but even we have to draw the line somewhere.
Likewise with the game industry, They shouldnt be interested in sales that bring a whole new set of headaches, scratched disks, multiplayer games that have had the cd key banned as I've seen happen a few times in BF2 for example.
our motto is you can only sell a tyre once, hopefully we'll never see it again until they want a new one and we'll dispose of it.
I'm all for keeping unnecessary angst out of our business, we made our cut if someone is willing to take the burden of having to deal with the bargain hunters then that person is most welcome to them. In a perfect world give me the flush individual with bags of cash who knows exactly what they want, any day of the week.
Greedy lazy capitalist pig........you'd better believe it
The tire business does have some parallels but the biggest difference is that tire companies don't just sell their product directly to consumers only. They also sell it directly to car manufactures so used sales aren't as big an issue as they are video games which only sell to the consumer.
I think we're going to find that a number of analogies don't seem to fit just right with the game industry; which, I think, is the problem the game companies are having themselves. The closest example in terms of dollars spent/received and production is the movie industry, but even that analogy fails due to the box office factor. No matter how many used copies of various movies end up on the shelves, "cutting into" movie companies' profits, the industry still enjoys a several-week (sometimes months) exclusive distribution channel in the form of movie theaters, and this is where the majority of their profits originate. Video games do not enjoy such a luxury.
FYI...Fletcher said:
...DVDs are now trumping theatre revenue considerably. However, I totally agree that the film industry?s two-punch distribution system easily makes for more profit.
I don?t know, but the short shelf life of titles and high prices seem to be linked to a delivery method that?s self-destructive. When you only give customers an opportunity to buy a game within a short time frame (6 months) and at a high price ($60), you make it very attractive to create and sustain a used games market.
Will the videogame industry concede its incompatible software architecture war? In no other industry do we see such an abandonment of profitable product like we do in the videogame industry.
An interesting sidenote is the question of why $60 is considered a high price. Is it? I paid CDN$70 for Oblivion and spent close to 100 hours playing it. Even if you add the amortized cost of the Xbox 360 I played it on, we're still talking about roughly $1 per hour of play. Only books beat that. I pay about CDN$45/mo for my digital cable, and yet I only watch roughly 10 hours of TV a month (if that); cable would be even more if it wasn't bundled with internet. When I go to the movies, I pay CDN$7-15 for 1.5-3 hours of entertainment.
Granted, not all games are as gargantuan as Oblivion. Some only last 10 or 15 hours. However, even 10 hours at CDN$70 is not an unreasonable investment of money for fun per unit time. Heck, it costs me CDN$9/hr (that's a per-person fee) to rent an indoor tennis court at the local YMCA, and that's on top of the CDN$400+ annual membership (which admittedly is almost fully subsidized by my employer, though that's a taxable benefit).
I'm not necessarily arguing that games are not expensive, I'm just speculating about why the perception exists (regardless of its validity). Added: I guess it's at least partly a question of up-front costs -- I bet a lot of World of WarCraft subscribers don't think about the hundreds of dollars they've paid Blizzard in monthly subscription fees.
Granted, not all games are as gargantuan as Oblivion. Some only last 10 or 15 hours. However, even 10 hours at CDN$70 is not an unreasonable investment of money for fun per unit time. Heck, it costs me CDN$9/hr (that's a per-person fee) to rent an indoor tennis court at the local YMCA, and that's on top of the CDN$400+ annual membership (which admittedly is almost fully subsidized by my employer, though that's a taxable benefit).
I'm not necessarily arguing that games are not expensive, I'm just speculating about why the perception exists (regardless of its validity). Added: I guess it's at least partly a question of up-front costs -- I bet a lot of World of WarCraft subscribers don't think about the hundreds of dollars they've paid Blizzard in monthly subscription fees.
This is very true. And also the retailers' call. They are the ones who pull the stock from shelves after it's been there only a few months/weeks to make room for new, incoming product. Which I can understand, there's a lot of product moving around.Echolocating said:
Except there's suddenly space on the shelves for the used product that's more than a few months/weeks old. You know, the used games market they facilitate, and by general consensus, the market on which they seem to pull in higher margins.
It's all relative.Ajar said:
When I was a young boy, I had lots of disposable income... when I was a young man, I had even more disposable income... now that I'm married, have a child, and a sizable mortgage, I consider games to be expensive. ;-)
Yeah, at my local EB Games, half the shelf space is used games. In fact, they don't even stack the same titles in front of one another, so you have 10 used copies of Halo 2 taking up an entire row. It's not a matter of not having enough room for older unopened product, it's a matter of just stocking enough new product to fuel their own used games market.Andraste said:
I don?t blame EB Games though.
The gaming industry is about reinventing the wheel over and over? and over again. As soon as developers take "a chance" and build an amazing game with yesterday's processing power, they'll realize that high-poly digital realism isn't the only means to sell games... hey, wait. Isn't Twilight Princess coming out soon? Hmmm... it will be interesting to see if a "technologically inferior" game can rise to fame. Maybe good game design is about functionality... instead of ultra realistic, real time 3D running at 100 frames per second.