More game developers whining about used games... - by lost_soul
Yakoob on 19/5/2011 at 05:14
Frothing at the mouth aside, if there's more people playing game X because they bought it second hand, than those playing it because they pirated it, then nothing in this article is outrageous at all - it's just facts. They lost more (potential) money from the second-hand owners than pirates. Cold, harsh, but honest truth.
Also factor in that second-hand lost sales are far more likely than pirate lost sales. You can argue "well that pirate wouldn't have bought it anyway," but if someone already spent some money on a game (particularily non-trivial amount like 1/2 - 3/4 of the actual price), then it's far more likely they might have, indeed, actually bought the full game if that option wasn't available.
As for my stance on the issue... I don't know, honestly. I fully support "you buy it you own it, do what you want with it," but I also understand the gripes of game devs, having worked at a company that also struggles to survive (admittedly better than others since we're still afloat, which, if anything, just shows how much stronger the hardships are for the average studio).
Quote Posted by Renzatic
I wish I could correlate sales numbers like that for my own personal gain.
Wait. Maybe I can.
Okay. Each person on earth (and this includes all of you here) is potentially one person who could give me one dollar. I expect this one dollar payment due to the service rendered of me being me. I'm a one-of-a-kind unique damn snowflake, and it's all for sale for just $1.
Thus far, no has given me that one dollar. If this lack of dollar payments continues til the end of the year, I could claim a net loss of $6 billion due to everyone being a bunch of stingy fuckers.
Stingy fuckers have cost me $6 billion. Excuse me while I go bitch about it.
Now throw in someone making 6 billion clones of you and selling them for 50 cents and maybe your allegory would actually be in any way not retarded.
Quote Posted by lost_soul
If you want to reduce resales, you could try keeping your fans happier. I will never sell my copies of Deus Ex 1, Thief, Doom, or Unreal. Release editing tools for your games. Provide multiple patches to fix major issues like getting stuck in level geometry and the like. Keep multiplayer servers up, or let the fans run them for themselves.
I think they are talking about casual gamers that make majority of their sales, not the 0.01% modding community. Yeah I know "uber loyal fans" and all that, but at the end of the day, the uver loyal fans just don't cut it as far as surviving :/
Quote Posted by negativeliberty
I know eons have passed since the days of games as hobby culture, but I seriously think today's games have now turned into "products" so utterly and completely that it's severely limiting the creative process (not really a controversial claim, but there it is).
Welcome to evolution of art.
Quote:
You can spare me the 'shareholder obligation' and 'endless growth' explanations too, because I'll just go blank and stare into the space between the pixels on my screen for any number of seconds and ponder how to bridge the wide gap between our perspectives.
How about "game developers like to eat food?" and "developing modern game is more than a weekend hobby project"
negativeliberty on 19/5/2011 at 06:01
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Point a.) Piracy doesn't have to be about capitalism. It can be about the fundamental right of an author of a work to control the methods and to whom that work is distributed. In my opinion that's a far more important consideration than money changing hands, since it involves human beings actually demonstrating some goddamn respect for each other.
Perhaps it doesn't have to be about cold hard cash, but really, more often than not, it is. More often than not, too, it's not at all about developers' control over their work but rather publishers' rights to monopolise an intellectual property (even if it's left to collect dust for a few decades). You actually don't hear too many developers complaining about piracy because probably they're more realistic and grounded than their corporate overlords could ever be, and also I would hope because they do actually respect those who greatly enjoy their work. If this was about the empowerment of developers (who, last I checked, don't often "own" IPs they themselves created and don't get to milk their own cashcows) then I would be a loud proponent. If however it's more about the publishers' responsibilities to their shareholders to squeeze out every potential dollar, whether it's real, fictional or just creative bookkeeping/wishful thinking then I would ask these publishers why the hell they even got into videogames in the first place, rather than, I don't know, work for Donald Trump or some such (well okay, he's $600 million in debt, but you catch my drift).
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Point b.) I'm simply saying that most consumers of videogames (or consumers in general) are idiots. For some reason people are actually stupid enough to spend $60 on a game and sell it for $10 a few weeks later, after which some other idiot is going to come in and pay $55 for it. I don't think there's another second-hand market in the world that is so obviously fucked. I'm not really sure how that relates to libraries, unless you equate contributing something to society by donating books to be the same as contributing $45 to the pockets of a company that has done more to turn gaming into a mindless medium of mass-consumption than any other.
Hmmm, I don't know. I've never seen a brand new game title at 20% of the retail price within months unless we're talking
serious flop (not second-hand or new) and I consider myself to be a moderately skilled bargain hunter, and conversely, I don't see many outrageously expensive second hand games either. I usually order new games online (amazon etc.) and they're somehow 30-50% cheaper than at local shops even though they're new (retail). The only time I buy second-hand games is for older titles that are hard/impossible to find otherwise like when my disk has been scratched. If we're going to analyse by means of anecdote then doing a simple amazon search for some somewhat new titles could be illuminating, picking some AAA multiplatform titles on purpose (considering their publishers are more prone to the whole lost revenue complaining thing);
Mass Effect 2 (PC): 10₤ new, 7₤ used
Mass Effect 2 CE (X360): 120₤ new, 30₤ used
Fallout: New Vegas (PC): 13₤ new, 13₤ used (curiously new is 1p cheaper)
Fallout: New Vegas (X360): 12.60€ new, 10₤ used
Crysis 2 (PC): 15₤ new, 23₤ used (I don't think anyone will fall for that one)
Crysis 2 (X360): 27₤ new, 24₤ used
..
Even searching for Lionhead's own older titles brings me no closer to understanding what they're (or you're) on about:
Fable: The Lost Chapters (PC), 8₤ new, 3₤ used
Fable 2 Classics (X360): 7₤ new, 3.20₤ used
Which begs the question why you don't hear artists, writers, musicians, film-makers etc. marching in the streets with "Say NO to 2nd hand" signs. I just don't see the big deal; people have the right to return games (or DVDs, books etc.) to shops (to varying degrees depending on local legislation and consumer protection laws) or to sell it themselves; shops don't then destroy something that's worth something and might sell it as used (as has been applied to pretty much all objects, art, goods, entertainment or otherwise for a long time) and to be honest it's a bit of a gamble when buying used disks that have wear anyway, as it is with a DVD or a book. I've been buying older games new and second-hand-new for years, so yeah excuse me if I question whether that amounts to killing the game industry. Especially when these extraordinary claims often originate in the decidedly mediocre-or-worse parts of the gaming community.
The library thing was a joke (and where I'm from libraries don't rely on donations, so that's not how it was meant); a perhaps dodgy reference to my suspicion that suppressing second-hand trade in whatever way has distinctively Orwellian connotations, especially in the case of books, music or films and I suppose games. Although I'm sure there's the perfectly mundane explanation that it's just about delicious $$$$$.
Renzatic on 19/5/2011 at 06:05
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Now throw in someone making 6 billion clones of you and selling them for 50 cents and maybe your allegory would actually be in any way not retarded.
Someone making 6 billion clones of me would be piracy, not used game sales.
I'm gonna boil this down to the basics here, to show that a sale of a used game doesn't necessarily mean a lost sale for the videogame industry.
So I buy a copy of a game for $60. I play it, enjoy it, then have it sit on my shelf for a year. Later on, I decide it isn't doing anyone any good just sitting there, so I decide to sell it to a friend for $20. Does this mean that the publisher has lost money on a sale? Not necessarily, because...
A. Friend buying the game a year after release most likely means he wasn't that interested in it to begin with. He probably wouldn't have bought a copy unless he had a convenient reason to. Me selling it for $20 is such a convenience.
B. Shelf space in brick and mortar stores isn't infinite. Unless it was a big name AAA high budget title, chances are good he wouldn't have been able to find a new copy himself.
...so the sale of older games doesn't necessarily correlate to a lost sale.
But what about popular games being sold used during their prime? Like Modern Warfare 2, which sold like, what? 10 kajillion copies? Activision made a cool billion off of it easily. They're rolling in their huge profit margin like pigs in mud. But then they look up and see that the game being sold used earned a good $300 million or so for Gamestop (in case you don't realize, I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here).
Of course Activision and the rest of the big name publishers stomp their feet and raise a stink, claiming that used games cost them $300 mil. That's over quarter of their profits! Hell, it must suck to be them! All losing a quarter of what they made, and watching their industry being murdered by a bunch of pushy salesmen at some random brick and mortar chain, who use scratched discs as murderous daggers to pierce their still beating heart of videogamedom.
Except they didn't lose even a single penny. They already made a billion bucks. That's the biggest point of all this. They made a billion goddamn dollars. There was no real loss from the used game market, other than a
potential sale from someone who may or may not have bought the game new to begin with.
So yeah, everyone in the world could give me a dollar for a chance to meet me. If half the people in the world ended up paying me that, it means I've gained 3 billion. I can't count the people who didn't pay me as a loss, screaming WAHHHH I COULD'VE MADE MORE all the while.
negativeliberty on 19/5/2011 at 06:52
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Welcome to evolution of art.
I know you're being sarcastic, but just in case; this is not the evolution of art or videogames, it's artificial selection by means of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Bobby Kotick. It just so happens the take-no-prisoners business model of the Gates and Jobs won, but why not question whether or not this is doing gaming any good?
Quote Posted by Yakoob
How about "game developers like to eat food?" and "developing modern game is more than a weekend hobby project"
I know it is (re-read the part with eons in it) which I why I support the devs by buying what's actually worth buying. I also know it's a tough business in which the actual talents themselves always seem to get the short end of the stick (seemingly random lay-offs, crushing deadlines which can only be made by 16-hour days 'crunch time', more lay-offs, (un)deserved insults thrown at them every 2.2 seconds, endlessly forced to remake the same game, being forced to compromise artistically etc.).
However, none of this
changes the fact that fighting piracy is the 21st century equivalent to fighting windmills, and it still doesn't answer how second-hand trade ever actually hurt anything. The point I'm trying to make is it's perhaps better to decouple this whole imaginary world of potential lost sales and stick to reality.
theBlackman on 19/5/2011 at 07:12
So, by the reasoning of these guys, if I buy an automobile (or anything else) and then sell it second hand the manufacturer is losing money.
The issue of ownership is a slippery slope. "My intellectual property is being stolen because someone sold a used copy of my (insert music, song, book, game) whatever." I bought the game for X. It is traded or sold for 1/2 X. Tough titty.
I've given away a lot of games. Some because they were not worth the price I paid, some because they were no longer being made for sale (Thief Gold) is a good example. I bought a few dozen from a overstock warehouse and distributed them to taffers who could not find them.
If the games they bitch about were worth a damn, perhaps the gamers would keep them and not trade them off.
Frankly I've seen few games in the last few years worth the asking price, or worth keeping for replay value.
Yakoob on 19/5/2011 at 07:19
Quote Posted by negativeliberty
I know you're being sarcastic, but just in case; this is not the evolution of art or videogames, it's artificial selection by means of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Bobby Kotick. It just so happens the take-no-prisoners business model of the Gates and Jobs won, but why not question whether or not this is doing gaming any good?
I'm not sarcastic. Every art form has gone through the same shit, from initial fear and dislike, to niche acceptance, to mass popularity and eventual capital exploitation.
Every. one.
Quote Posted by theBlackman
So, by the reasoning of these guys, if I buy an automobile (or anything else) and then sell it second hand the manufacturer is losing money.Except that to resell a car you need to spend a shitton in fixes, repaintings, tuning and pollution testing. And even than, it will never run as good as a newly bought car. Games, on the other hand...
Quote:
So yeah, everyone in the world could give me a dollar for a chance to meet me. If half the people in the world ended up paying me that, it means I've gained 3 billion. I can't count the people who didn't pay me as a loss, screaming WAHHHH I COULD'VE MADE MORE all the while.
Except that you are not a product that brings anyone value (not meant as ad-hominem), nor have you put substantial effort into making yourself exist, so I don't see how it applies.
A better allegory would be if you made a video that teaches people how to dance and sold it on a corner of a street. A few people buy it, and a week later, the same people waltz in with amazing skills, clearly obtaining full value from your product. Then they open up a shop right next to yours reselling your movie at half the price.
Yea it's perfectly legal, and it's totally in their right to do that. But don't tell me you wouldn't be somewhat upset when the line to your booth started to die out as people started crowding towards your "competitors," and new ones popped up everywhere each week.
I'm not trying to make you agree with the devs sentiment. I'm merely trying to get you to
understand it.
Renzatic on 19/5/2011 at 08:37
Quote Posted by Yakoob
...Yea it's perfectly legal, and it's totally in their right to do that. But don't tell me you wouldn't be somewhat upset when the line to your booth started to die out as people started crowding towards your "competitors," and new ones popped up everywhere each week.
Every booth that pops up selling used copies of my hugely popular waltz videos means that, at some point, I've sold new copies. That's a good thing. And since I'm the sole copyright holder, only I can make copies to sell again when stocks dwindle. So if they want to stay in business, they'll have to rely on people buying my video new, so they can resell it used later.
And hey, if they're popping up every week, then that means I'm selling boatloads of waltz videos. I've already made a ton of money. What does it matter if I might potentially in some alternate dimension sortakinda be losing a sale I may or may not have gotten in the first place? Yeah, if the First Sale doctrine didn't exist, then all money exchanged for my videos would be going directly to me.
...BUT I'M ALREADY MAKING MONEY! Should I pout after making $3 million dollars because, if the odds were stacked in my favor, I could've made $4 million? I guess if I were an overly greedy, petulant bastard, yeah, I probably would. Otherwise, who cares, as long as you're turning a profit, why worry about the what ifs?
Malf on 19/5/2011 at 09:13
I suspect there's another undercurrent here outlining the difference between game developers and the creators of other media.
A musician or author knows that if someone buys a second-hand copy of their work, there's the possibility that the buyer may then want to buy more works by the artist, possibly first-hand. That means the creator will get something further down the line.
Game development teams have a massive turnover of staff. There's no guarantee that the company will have the same employees even only a year later. Because high profile games are made by corporations, they ensure that the people who work on the titles have no rights to the art they create.
To that end, people get nervous about seeing a return on a product that's been made while they are employed by the company making it, managerial staff more than creators. So they want to maximise the profits they'll see for any given product and don't give a damn about building a fanbase.
This may seem contrary when regarding something like the Call of Duty franchise, which has a massive fanbase, but then you just have to look at how they're desperately trying to milk all that they can from it before interest dies, and you'll see it backs up the theory. There's no long-term goal with the companies that make games. They don't have ten year business plans. They don't understand that games will continue to sell long after they're made if they're good enough; this is evidenced by the ridiculous focus on pre-orders and day one sales. They may not be there next year, they have no rights to what they've made because they've voluntarily signed away those rights, so they need to make the money back NOW.
I've long thought that the game industry needs to unionise at the very least, in the same way Hollywood has the Screen Actors/Writers Guilds. Maybe then we'll see some interest in maintaining fan interest, making creators realise the true value of second hand sales.
Sorry, bit of a ramble there, but I think I got my point across.
Yakoob on 19/5/2011 at 09:13
Quote Posted by Renzatic
...BUT I'M ALREADY MAKING MONEY! Should I pout after making $3 million dollars because, if the odds were stacked in my favor, I could've made $4 million?
it cost you 3.5 million to make the video.
What now?
Kuuso on 19/5/2011 at 09:30
I'm not taking a side here, but throwing down a thought: What if used games sales are actually keeping game prices in check a bit? What if games are simply way too expensive in general?
Games are ridiculously expensive to make and as expensive to buy. The "demand" for higher tech has marginalized gaming by making it expensive. Maybe there's a bigger problem behind this all with studios throwing a billion in the wind and hoping it works. Also when compared to blockbuster movies (the forthcoming Batman movie has a budget of 250 million) games start looking a bit odd. They can cost same to make, but the movie will always be way cheaper to see.
