Game Resales and Project $10

http://www.entertainingcode.com/archives/game-resales-and-project-10/

by slicedlime • 16 years ago

10 6 16 years ago

akgerber• 16 years ago

If used games are a "problem" for publishers it simply indicates that they haven't worked hard enough to give a game replay value.

kevinh• 16 years ago

The nature of some games is not conducive to replaying it. Games with story driven plots tend to lag when replaying it, although the experience may be worth the price of admission. For instance, I played through Bioshock once and thought it was worth the money. However, I have yet to replay it. I, for one, support this. This is content they could simply release as DLC for everyone, but they choose to give it out for free to people who buy the game new, making an incentive for users to buy new.

No matter how fun a game is, there's a certain segment of the gaming population that will trade it in after the first run through, and another segment who only buys games used to save money. I see no problem with companies monetizing this segment of the population.

kschrader• 16 years ago

Pre-owned games pose much of the same problem on the console market as piracy does on the PC market. The end result of both is the same: people play our games without a single bit of money ending up with the people who made the game. In the worst case, we end up paying a lot of money to keep servers online, while getting no money at all from the sale. In the worst case, we end up paying a lot of money to keep servers online, while getting no money at all from the sale.

I find it hard to believe that he's making this argument with a straight face. When someone pirates a game then you have two copies of the game online. When someone purchases a used copy of a game then, sure, the publisher doesn't get any more money, but the servers still have the same level of traffic on them.

This is like saying that selling a used car that's still under warranty is bad for the car manufacturers because they now need to maintain the car, even though it has a new owner.

If your original price can't cover the cost of the services that you've promised to provide then clearly you need to raise your prices.

ghshephard• 16 years ago

Well, presuming that games have a lifespan, of say N hours, then there really is (from the producers side) very little difference between a game being resold X times or being pirated X times. In both cases, their servers experience X*N hours of usage, and they only get paid the original Y dollars.

The car analogy doesn't hold up, because there is an expectation that the warranty would be used for the entire lifetime of the warranty, whereas games that are sold aren't done so with the expectation that after 40 hours of usage or so, they'd be resold continuously to other parties who would also play them for 40 hours, and so on. Perhaps a better analogy is that the warranty on a car has an explicit limit on the number of miles that may be driven, which prevents the warranty from being used by multiple parties driving the car continuously.

As counterintuitive as it may seem (and, i expect controversial on HN) I actually think providing a service code with the original game (that can be purchased for $10 by future purchasers of the game) actually aligns the use of the service and payment to the server operators quite well, without getting into the ugly world of "You may use the online service for Z hours before your account times out." (going back to the Car Warranty analogy)

strongsauce• 16 years ago

Not that I'm going to feel sorry for the retailers who are complaining because they may possibly not get that sweet sweet resale of a used game but I feel like this just leads us down a slope where in the future more and more games will have parts cut out of it unless you buy it new and paid your $10. What's going to happen when there are _no_ more new copies? Are they going to release the extra content for free at that point?

And what's to say that for Mass Effect 3 EA won't limit the number of endings you can achieve unless you buy it new?

Oh shit, I think I just gave them an idea.

matwood• 16 years ago

<i>I’m sorry if that takes money out of retailers pockets, but I really do think that the talented people who sweat blood making these games deserve the money more than people who only know how to push people to buy used instead of new.</i>

Then the developers should just charge more up front. I only buy used (or deeply discounted) games because $60 is just too much to spend. If they make it where I still have to spend close to $60 even on a new or discounted game I just won't buy anymore games.

Game Resales and Project $10

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