Publishers crusades against pre-owned games justified?

If the game is running a backbone server rather than P2P I think that online charges are fine.

For instance you buy a game for £45 and pay £5 to take the game online. That comes to £50 which is generally what new games are bought for. Obviously if you find the game cheaper somewhere online, it's going to be maybe £35 for the game, and pay £5 to take the game online.

If devs did this. If you bought it preowned, devs would still see the £5 it costs to take the game online and so they will see income, whether its to keep up an infrastructure or buy a KFC.
 
I don't have a problem with the principle of one use codes being issued, my only problem is that my copy of Tiger Woods 11 I bought on Saturday doesn't have a usable code! Still waiting on their tech support trying to fix it :mad:
 
8igdave said:
I find it hilarious how so many of you are saying awww poor game dev's loosing out on money. Simple solutions for you:

1) Stop making poor games that get traded in within a few days of buying it.

2) Stop charging so much for games it's insulting and as a result the only place to buy games is online. That means that game only can really sell pre-owned because they can't compete on new games.

3) Grow up and relise you are perfetic. It's true, this is a pathetic grab at money which they don't deserve quite frankly. I've never traded a game in which I enjoyed. I've never bought a game which I thought I would enjoy second hand either. Nor have I ever bought a game second hand if I could get it for £25 new. Work it out ;)
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Yeah some nice simple solutions there. :rolleyes:
 
basically because you are getting sold the experience not an actual product.

We are consumers - we consume. We shouldnt get ideas above that. profit-makin is for businesses only :p

Though it is a tad annoying that something you pay for will have zero value after you have purchased it ie no possibility for you to sell it on. (re: death of 2nd hand market).

Although the publishers would have it that we dont buy it we buy a licence to play the media on the disc...... ;) :D
 
That's like saying my record collection can never be sold because if I sell them on the original artist won't make any money.

Tough titties to the developers imo. They sold it initially, that's their profit. Let everyone else make some after that however it is sold.
 
Bloodshot said:
Yeah some nice simple solutions there. :rolleyes:
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I'm sorry. Why should games cost £50? Greed and then they complain that people buy it second hand? Quite frankly games are also just been shot out without much thought to them now days too. Take the Need for speed games, cod games are getting really bad imo. etc etc. That is why this happened. Not because all of a sudden everyone has taken a love to pre-owned games.

Truth of the matter is they are what I said. Simple solutions. They are the whole reason all this happened and the whole reason we are getting such poop games now. All they care about is money. There used to be love put into their games. Hell to be quite frank I'd say that lionhead studios put the most love into their games even if they do have to suffer peter whats his face. Can you really tell me that the dev's of the last NFS game saw anything but money while they were making it?

You might say well it's a buisness. Ok then, so do it with books now. Do you think tehy would sell if they were just wrote for money? No they would be rubbish.
 
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Liquid_Entity said:
That's like saying my record collection can never be sold because if I sell them on the original artist won't make any money.

Tough titties to the developers imo. They sold it initially, that's their profit. Let everyone else make some after that however it is sold.
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Developers and publisher's aren't intentionally making it hard to sell second hand games privately; this has come about because of retailers taking **** with their blatant disregard for selling NEW games and their complete bias towards making profit on selling pre-owned titles first.

Try and find a 6 month old game for NEW in Game or Gamestation; it won't happen. Actually, I doubt you'd find any game over 3 months old that isn't in the top 10.
 
8igdave said:
I'm sorry. Why should games cost £50? Greed and then they complain that people buy it second hand? Quite frankly games are also just been shot out without much thought to them now days too. Take the Need for speed games, cod games are getting really bad imo. etc etc. That is why this happened. Not because all of a sudden everyone has taken a love to pre-owned games.
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That's how much games have always cost? Games cost millions of dollars to make?
 
Bloodshot said:
Developers and publisher's aren't intentionally making it hard to sell second hand games privately; this has come about because of retailers taking **** with their blatant disregard for selling NEW games and their complete bias towards making profit on selling pre-owned titles first.

Try and find a 6 month old game for NEW in Game or Gamestation; it won't happen. Actually, I doubt you'd find any game over 3 months old that isn't in the top 10.
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ahhh right, the retail shops. I never buy from them. Yeah from that view I guess it is slightly bad, profiteering.
 
Bloodshot said:
That's how much games have always cost? Games cost millions of dollars to make?
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In the history of all my gaming I don't remeber ever buying a game for £50 and I have bought many many games on release. So I doubt that some how.

Games cost millions to make. So do films. Do films charge you £50 to go see it? No. A good game can easily sell and make solid profits on half that cost and we know they can because they used to! It's the law of the world. They bump up prices gradulaly and we keep paying more and more because they play the market and now the prices have just got too high and people are turning to second hand. How can you even argue this? It's blatant.
 
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Bloodshot said:
That's how much games have always cost? Games cost millions of dollars to make?
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Most games do, yeah. It's been really bad for this particular round of consoles. The teams have ballooned massively. Imagine having to pay the wages of 25 people (typical number involved in a studio making a game) for 2 years to make a game. Assuming they're earning 18k a year (that's a REALLY low figure by the way, most will get paid way more), that's 900k on wages alone.

The bigger games are way higher and can involve hundreds of people.
 
KNiVES said:
Most games do, yeah. It's been really bad for this particular round of consoles. The teams have ballooned massively. Imagine having to pay the wages of 25 people (typical number involved in a studio making a game) for 2 years to make a game. Assuming they're earning 18k a year (that's a REALLY low figure by the way, most will get paid way more), that's 900k on wages alone.

The bigger games are way higher and can involve hundreds of people.
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This is true. But hiring tom cruise to do a film costs something like 40-60 million. And i beleive with the cinima in its current state and films being pirated far far more then games imo that the size of the market of a good film and a good game is not hugely differnt. At least not when you consider taht the game is asking for 8 or 9 times more money from you. I mean, do you really beleive that 7 or 8 times more people will go see the new film "knight and day" compared to how many bought cod?
 
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8igdave said:
In the history of all my gaming I don't remeber ever buying a game for £50 and I have bought many many games on release. So I doubt that some how.

Games cost millions to make. So do films. Do films charge you £50 to go see it? No. A good game can easily sell and make solid profits on half that cost and we know they can because they used to! It's the law of the world. They bump up prices gradulaly and we keep paying more and more because they play the market and now the prices have just got too high and people are turning to second hand. How can you even argue this? It's blatant.
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I think you'll find that back when the Megadrive / Master System was about, games actually cost MORE than they do now. Additionally, games don't cost £50.00 - they're like £40 new from Game for Gamestation.

As for your film point; films have MULTIPLE forms of revenue. Cinema releases, DVD and Blu-Ray releases. They also have a strict rental agreement (which is enforced by law) where rental companies have to pay a MASSIVE premium PER RENTAL copy of a film. We simply don't have these alternate revenue streams.
 
Bloodshot said:
Try and find a 6 month old game for NEW in Game or Gamestation; it won't happen. Actually, I doubt you'd find any game over 3 months old that isn't in the top 10.
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I had exactly this problem when I was looking for Fallout 3 GOTY/Fable 2 GOTY.

Game didn't have any stock whatsoever new, only Fable 2/Fallout 3 standard editions as second hand.
 
Bloodshot said:
I think you'll find that back when the Megadrive / Master System was about, games actually cost MORE than they do now. Additionally, games don't cost £50.00 - they're like £40 new from Game for Gamestation.

As for your film point; films have MULTIPLE forms of revenue. Cinema releases, DVD and Blu-Ray releases. They also have a strict rental agreement (which is enforced by law) where rental companies have to pay a MASSIVE premium PER RENTAL copy of a film. We simply don't have these alternate revenue streams.
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I point you to my post above. It's true that most cost £40 but this is still too high and they used to sell for £30 brand new. Sure the n64 and that was expensive but that was all new and cool etc. Just like the first pc's and colour screen tv's.

As in my above post not only did I point out that films are by far more pirated but I also don't know hardly anyone who doesn't just sit back and stream and film when bored and I know many who refuse to pay for the cinima now that they are charging so much, even for popcorn £3-4 ? Screw off!

Games are also rented but I do agree this is probably quite a good source of income for films which I hadn't thought of. I still beleive however that a film costs a lot more to make then a game. Like i said earlyer, tom cruise costs at least 40-60 million to hire for a film. In 2004 he was paid 40million for a film, might have been MI3 I forgot which. That was 6 years ago! Cameran Diaz probably charged a similar fee. That was before the film was even shot!!!

So not only are these films costing substantialy more probably 4 or 5 times as much as a game. They are also charging a lot less to see them and like I said before. Do you beleive that more people will pay to watch "knight and day" then there are who paid for cod? Nope I don't think so.

Simply put the prices could be less but they arn't because of "business" well then you must expect the world to adapt and create new businesses which are better competition. Just like ebay for example. So don't complain when people buy second hand because they were charging too much.

:EDIT:

Infact when I think about it. At uni everyone pirates films and tv series almost weekly. This has to be hurting their revenue extreamly. But it's just like pc games. The cost of cinima is getting too high and a lot of people just cba to buy dvd's when they could download it. I think there is a huge industry in the likes of steam and that doing dvd's as well as games. Suprised they havn't done it. I bet a lot of people would buy dvd's off steam. The problem is getting the market out to non gamers.

:EDIT2:

I spose Itunes already sells films doesn't it? Thats probably too big a competitor for steam to take on.
 
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I'm sorry, but what?

What you just said has absolutely no relevance to my point at all... in the slightest.
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of course it does. no one flogs 2nd hand items that only cost £4.99 in a bargain bin because the difference of paying £2.50 2nd hand or £5 new is relatively low - despite the percentage difference being larger,

the larger the actual value of the item itself the more worthwhile a 2nd hand market becomes. hence why cars have a huge 2nd hand market.

of course it has relevence. imagine HMV offered trade in on DVD and CD's? people would buy them for cheap, take them home, rip them, go back and trade it in/probably do the same thing over and over again.

with games you cannot do that. for the reasons i stated.

In contrast, that same year EA made a LOSS of $641 Million Dollars... EA, the second largest publisher in the world. Now, please tell me why Gamestop making $1 Billion profits off of used game sales make any sense when publishers / developers are making loses and seeing none of that revenue?
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how do gamestop sell a 2nd hand product if a new product has not already been sold.

why do EA lose so much money? because they have few sucessful franchises but still retain huge costs from the rights they acquire to OWN that market segment. FIfa, nhl etc go to indicate this.

when u go to the online EA store you will find some new games, such as MoH for £34.99 direct download?

fifa 2010 £29.99

tiger woods 2011 - £49.99

so lets just say that frankly no one buys directly from them as they offer sub par products or price themselves out of a competative market with a non retail product.

deleting the 2nd hand game market wont help them. well it will a little bit indirectly but because you dont understand indirect relationships and benefits then this means nothing to you.

but basically they make a loss because they are bad at their business, they overprice their direct offerings in a drastic attempt to profit gouge and then try to artificially inflate game prices by restricting the 2nd hand market - to try and force people to spend closer to the amount that their bean counting managers say is their margin expectation.
 
We simply don't have these alternate revenue streams.
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Oh my god. i knew it from the relentlessly baffling nature of your stance. you work for a games developer right?

or an affilliate of. no wonder you want to screw the customer.

if you work harder, re align margin expectations, maybe you too can make a profit without having to artifically block a thriving market?
 
I think some of the comparisons of other markets people are trying to compare the game industry to are a bit silly.

Music/Films - People generally don't tend to get rid of or trade in unless they really need the cash. Generally you put it in your collection, as you will watch or listen to it again someday.

Cars - Totally... totally different kind of market and industry, not even worth mentioning.

I think it's only fair to look at games as it's own industry and it's fair to do so with it being such a huge part of the entertainment industry now.


Personally, I think it's fine for Publishers to do.
I myself do tend to buy most of my games brand new and have never traded in anything, they are all in my cupboard, so admittedly, I wouldn't loose out like somebody else would.

The trouble is now that any shop you go in now selling a good selection of games will have a pre-owned section, often bigger than the brand new games. Tesco's announcement, as I commented on yesterday is only further evidence as to how much money the trade-in market is making retailers, and how much the Publishers are loosing out.

HMV extended it's Pre-Owned section in the flagship Oxford Street store not so long ago, so it's now bigger than the new games. Infact, I've spotted them selling used copies of games for £30, while a brand new one can be found hidden away for £10!

Arguing that games shouldn't be so expensive doesn't work, because if more and more second hand games are sold over new ones, it's only going to cause Publishers to have to raise the prices further to make up for the loss. Small Publishers will most likely go and we will end up with less games on the market... so both Publishers and Gamers loose out and the only ones who win are the retailers.

I'd also say, that depending on what model finds favor.... we've currently heard that a Developer is planning to allow you to buy the missing content for about $10 on a second hand copy. If this is the case, it could mean that second hand game prices will have to be dropped, as adding in the extra cost will make buying the brand new one the better deal.
 
Bloodshot said:
Now, please tell me why Gamestop making $1 Billion profits off of used game sales make any sense when publishers / developers are making loses and seeing none of that revenue?
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Possibly repeating what others may have said (as it's normally brought up) but, why should the games industry be different to any other?

Should all 2nd-hand car showrooms be closed because the original manufacturer won't get a cut?

What about the other end of the scale - what if I offloaded some books to my local market bookstall? The author and publisher won't see a dime when they're resold.

Ok, the money involved is drastically different, but the principle is the same. I must admit, I like to know that whatever money I'm spending that at least a small part is going to the devs, so I'll generally buy new, or wait until what I want drops in price (which isn't a long time these days).

Games deserve no special treatment compared to other products that face 2nd-hand sales.
 
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