Secret world leader (shhh) said:
As someone who wants to be a game designer in the future I always buy a new copy of a game. I personally think that the publisher not getting any money when the game they put shittonnes of money into is sold used is bullshit.
On the other hand, I can see that from the point of view of a gamer on a budget, Used games are an enticing option.
My question is, If you were a publisher/developer, What would you do (aside from the obvious answer of digital distribution) to encourage people to buy your game new?
I Personally think that EA's project ten dollar isn't a bad start. For me, it's a win-win situation, EA gets their money, I get free stuff. But (that i know of) used game sales are (from a developer's point of view) still a problem.
Because of this, I think publishers should add some extra bait onto their hooks. Say someone gets bulletstorm new and puts in the code, they get some purely cosmetic gun and armor skins...that's it. I think that for the $27 that EA gets from a new sale that they wouldn't get from a used sale, There should be more incentive to buy new.
From what i've seen, most decent-sized DLC packs cost about £5 or more, The person buying used usually saves about £5.
Say a used customer and a new customer both buy a game and an excellent DLC for it costing £9.99. Now imagine the online pass that the new customer gets were to give not some cosmetic skins but that £9.99 DLC for free and also before anyone who bought a used copy. This way, (if my math is correct) The person buying new would save more money than the person buying used Making the new copy clearly the cheaper option.
It wouldn't make EVERYONE buy the game new but I think it would certainly help.
What do you think of this idea? Also, for added discussion value, What do you think of used games in general?
There are a lot of things that could be done, but one of the big ones is to simply lower game prices substantially, and that includes halting the DLC gouging. Of course this would mean lowering the amount of money people in the industry make. Right now the big issue is that you have development teams setting their own prices and salaries. Try and deny how much money is being made, but when a developer demands 50 million dollars to make a game that means that the team plans to pay it's people most of that money over the period of a year or two. Then the producers need to set game prices accordingly.
Likewise, there is cartel behavior involved in the industry, that is to say that to avoid direct competition and companies undercutting each other, there is a "set price" agreed on by the industry for what games cost. A game that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and a game that cost a couple of million both wind up retailing for $60. Not only is this kind of thing criminal (case in point: federal investigations of gas companies for price setting. They however have yet to take official notice of gaming yet because it isn't big enough I believe and nobody has lodged serious complaints), but it also means that people are far less likely to want to risk their $60 on new games, irregardless of the developers, since everyone is screaming about their "AAA" title and it's "lavish production values" when in reality those terms mean nothing, being marketing hype, and there is no real connection between what you pay for something, and what you actually get when buying new. Honestly the rate at which prices drop on the used rack oftentimes says more about the quality of a game than anything else (though there are exceptions).
What's more with those $60 price tags, the used market is also based heavily on trade ins. The abillity to pretty much get a new game free for every 3-4 you buy and trade in. This helps to make the hobby more sustainable for those who want to always have a game around to play.
The industry talks about all the money it loses to used games, but that's simply corperate bean counters talking. Like with piracy, the assumption that if these "alternate methods of aquisition" were not availible that people would buy games new is false, a lot of the people using those methods do so because they don't have the money to buy all the games that they want to try.
Likewise, depending on where you bought from, returning a game might not be viable. A lot of places won't take games that have been played back at full price, you have to sell them used. This is especially true with games that include DLC codes, because if like most people you put in the DLC when you first started a game you thought you'd like, it's no longer any good. Nobody likes getting stuck with a product they don't like.
In connection to the above, the industry again doesn't help matters by holding all of it's cards to it's chest. Really there is no way to tell what a game is like until after it's released due to tight information control, limited demos, and similar things. Buying games is very much a "blind" promposition, where really the only thing you have to go on is the word of blind shills. The much known tendency of game companies to do things like surpress negative reviews for a while after a game's release has also hurt the matter. Simply put, if a gaming company makes a turd, it still wants to promote it as solid gold to try and make their money back at least. With all the turds (of one sort or another) raining down on the market, it shouldn't shock anyone that so many people figure "well, I'll just buy the game used".
I'll also be honest in saying I think digital distribution has actually helped the used market to some extent. To put it bluntly given that digitally distributed games cost the same thing to cusomters despite costing companies far less has annoyed a lot of people, especially seeing as they have even LESS recourse for getting something back from a game they are unhappy with due to the inabillity to return it or sell it on the used market. Truthfully I've noticed an increasing run (at least locally) on older, physical-media games out of budget sections at Gamestop and such. How much of a trend it actually is overall, I have no idea. Right now "no online requirement, no DLC" is actually a selling point, and I've actually seen stickers to that effect.
The point is that to address the issue the industry has to do what it doesn't want to do, and that is change a model that can't sustain itself. Cutting the quality of games is of course not an option due to the demands of the market, rather what needs to be cut are the developer fees involved in these games, and really I don't think that's as "impossible" as many people seem to think. Even if a lot of people in the gaming media will sit there and say "I know people in the industry and they aren't all making fortunes, they are usually pretty humble and probably make less than you do" I don't buy it. You toss these millions upon millions of dollars into a game development, it's going to the people, the materials aren't that expensive in proportion to these budgets. If the developers ARE that poor, just for the sake of arguement, it still comes down to development cuts, because that means the studio heads are the ones pocketing it. Either way it's all a matter of payroll, and that's where the cuts are going to have to happen. Simply put, gaming is not yet on the level of "Hollywood" so people can't expect the kinds of paydays that guys who make movies get (and by this I don't mean movie stars, guys like Grips who do a lot of the grunt work make some pretty impressive amounts of money).
I'll also be honest in saying that while hiring well known actors and actresses for voice work is cool, it's also an unnessicary development expense. Again, this isn't Hollywood. Is hiring half a dozen well known TV and movie Actors (like Patrick Stewart and people like that) to provide voices or allow themselves to be digitized, really worth that much of the development budget, and the amount of money that means these games have to cost?
To be honest, I've long gotten the impression that part of the game developer lifestyle right now is to want to meet and "hang out with" even just professionally, famous people, especially geek icons. Sometime ask yourself how much a lot of this actually benefitted the game, and how much it was fulfilling the fantasies of some game developer. To be honest while it can be cool to hear a famous voice, at the same time I don't nessicarly think that these people are always the best performers in the games, nor do they always fit the role they are assigned to. It's been a while, but more than a few people have pointed out how Patrick Stewart might have delivered his lines well for the beginning of "Oblivion" (and it's a famous opening sequence) but he also has an accent that doesn't match anyone else in the
area he lives in.... including his own family.
Doubtlessly not what you, or anyone in the industry, wants to hear, but that's what I think.
Want to stop used game sales, lower the prices of the games without reducing the quality, in some cases I think that will actually be surprisingly easy. After all while you can understand why a hundred million dollar game costs $60, ones with far lesser development budgets are far less understandable other than price setting. Indeed there will probably still be a market for $60 games, but only if they are developed on that level.
This of course also requires honest among the industry, and more revelation of what their product actually is. Taking a bath on the occasional turd by being honest about it will probably make more people willing to buy your games that don't turn out to be turds at the full retail price.
