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Developers Inventing New Strategies to Fight Used Game Sales
by Blake Ellison, Nov 10, 2008 11:41am PSTEpic president Mike Capps hinted recently that methods aside from new-copies-only DLC might appear to incentivize gamers away from the used game trade, which for years has taken potential profits from developers and left it in the hands of retailers.
"I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay $20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free,'" explained Capps to GamesIndustry, explaining one possible strategy that could take form.
Around the Epic offices, used games aren't exactly welcome. "We certainly have a rule at Epic that we don't buy any used games--sure as hell you're not going to be recognised as an Epic artist going in and buying used videogames--because this is how we make our money and how all our friends in the industry make money," Capps said.
Making a thinly-veiled reference to mega-retailer GameStop, Capps commented, "Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales." The president sees a solution in digital distribution--or at least downloadable expansions to traditionally sold games. "I think DLC will be increasing in scope just because in the US we really need to make strides against the second-hand market," he said.
Epic is making its own strides by including one-time DLC codes in new copies of Gears of War 2, which released last week. EA Canada and Harmonix have followed suit in NBA Live 09 and Rock Band 2, respectively.
Comments
If you want to compete with retailers and get some of the "secondary money" that comes with computer (or video) games, then you need to offer a better alternative. Instead of whining about a market trend, use it to your advantage.
Retailers offer used video games, and gamers buy them. Why is that? Gamers buy used games because they're cheaper and the only drawback (the game is used) is a minor one. Retailers sell used games because it brings them additional cash.
Rather than "punishing" players for buying used games, reward those who buy new games AND get yourself a share of the used game market. Here are some things you can do:
1) Sell older titles at reduced prices. You can easily beat retail stores when it comes to the "reduced price" game. If some used and out-of-print games are selling for upwards of $100 on eBay, you can expect to continue selling your (decent) games for a long time after retailers have given them up for lack of profit. One example: Diablo 2 is almost ten years old and people still buy the Diablo 2 Chest brand new because it's cheap. Other old computer games are repackaged and sold by secondary owners for $10-15 a pop.
2) Resell used games yourself. Anything retailers can do to re-certify used games, you can do better. DLC can be sold with a key, and the key can be transferred for a nominal fee. Why would a gamer pay a retailer $15 for a used game when they can get the same game from you for $20 with a DLC key?
3) Give gamers the option of "renewing" their DLC or reactivating a used game by paying a small fee. If the price is right, you'll make money every time the game is re-sold.
-Khalaq
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The reason second hand sales matter, in the case of Gamestop? It's one of our primary, if not the primary, places we sell games. Nobody cares about or is complaining about people selling used copies in eBay or other second hand places. But Gamestop is literally making 500 million or more a year off this practice and game developers see nothing. This practice pretty much saved Gamestop and made them wildly profitable.
I see nothing wrong with offering 1st run buyers a little extra incentive, vs people that buy used games.
So, you guys keep raging on.
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Sounds like you guys have an identity crisis on your hands, here.
What you're really after is more money, bottom line. If you wanted to create an easy solution and not jeopardize your player base actually hating you for it, you would find a way to get in on Gamestop's action.
You could propose a contract for your specific titles where you receive a percentage of used game sales. Then again, it's their money so why would they give it to you?
Seriously, there have been retailers selling used games since games have existed, and this has never been a problem. Quit your whining and man up, make better games and don't go running from a market just because there's pirates.
You don't think there's pirates on the console systems? HAHAHAHAHAAHA.
Seriously wake up.
A store found a way to make selling or purchasing used games so convenient that users are willing to take a couple $ hit per transaction for convenience. News at 11.
What a whiny bunch of people those people are. Oh, somebody is making money because they figured out a way to provide a service that the software developers and distributors have not been able to capitalize on. Now they're trying.. haphazardly.
It is SO EASY and the solution is staring you stupid people right in the face: digital distribution.
Cut a few $ off the first-hand purchase price and tie the game to an account. Kind of like Steam does. You know Steam?
Then, make it easy to transfer the license to another user. For a fee of, say, 20% of the current purchase price of the game.
You make the profit. Stores get cut out of a large chunk.
But of course you'd rather whine and complain when you're just being stupid petty little idiots.
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Look at the music industry. They are whining about pirating, but they don't give two craps about secondhand CD sales. And if anyone has a real problem with the loss of sales due to secondhand stores like GrayWhale, they are sure not piping up about it.
Epic's method of capturing "first sales" is.... okayish.... however, they have guaranteed broken map to map online experiences because of it. It's either "SEE YA!" if you bought the game off eBay or something, or online people simply don't play the maps anymore because half of the people playing won't have them. Personally, I see this restriction on the Flashback Pack going away within 12 months.
If developers want to do this to attract first-sale buyers for a month or two after a game comes out, I see no problem with that. However, saying "Hey you! Pay $20 if you want to see the end of the game!" seems to me like "Hey buddy, I know you bought this car from your neighbor, but you're going to have to pay 100% more than you paid for the car to be able to drive it. Sorry! Should have bought new!!"
This kind of attitude is what turns people off to developers anyway. This disconnection from what everyday, casual gamers are dealing with only makes it seem like our industry is even more stuck up and snobby than it needs to be.
In my opinion, every game developer should be trying to connect with their fan base on a regular basis by any means necessary. The farther a developer gets from "We love games" and into "We make games", the lower the quality of their games gets and then we start to see whining about piracy and secondhand sales.
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Games are not books, movies, or CDs. The economy isn't the same. The RIAA doesn't care about used CD sales because they get paid every time a song is played on the radio. Movies have so many avenues of sale: At the theater, then the dollar house, then on DVD, then HBO / Scrotime / Cinemax, then again with the PPV. Oh and also there's a Blu-Ray and HDDVD version of your favorite movie too.
If you buy new, you're supporting the people who make the games you like. If you buy used, you're supporting the asshole corporation who treats their employees and customers like shit.
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Initial gamestop used sales are a straight up rip off. Retail price - $5. Over time though the price actually reflects customer demand. ie: Hunting down a used copy of FF tactics at one time used to run $50+ for years until the remakes, whereas something like Kane & Lynch plummeted in price and is now under $20.
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Discs need to stop being pressed, and everything should go digital distribution. Without packaging materials, packaging artwork printing, disc pressing, there will be hella more money to play with for the developers - possibly make up for their 'apparent' losses from piracy. OMG no way ?!
Buying discs is fucking stupid - people should just get over it and stop it.
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You just bought a game, brand new off the shelf. You drive home eagerly and put it into your console, you play it for a couple of hours and decide that you don't like it. What are you going to do? Trade it in? The store won't want it, thay can't sell used games. Sell it to your friend? They won't want it with half the levels missing. So now you're stuck with a game you don't like, nothing to do but keep it or throw it away. What a waste.
Another point I could make is that game retail is a circle of life. The developer ships the game to the store, the store sells it and re-sells it and uses the profit to be able to sell the dev's games again. What if there's no re-sale? The stores profits can be cut severely and may not be able to sell more games by the dev, killing their profit as well.
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They think we don't care how badly they treat their customers but we care. No other industry could get away with this kind of behavior. Somehow they think they will be the exception. This kind of gouging of the customer may work out well for them in the short term but people will catch on eventually.
Here's a tip, want to sell more copies? make better games.
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As far as I am concerned.. Hack, crack, and steal every game you want. The dev's insatiable greed is ruining the industry anyway. Bottom line, the developers need /US/ the customer, we do not them.. All they create is another form of increasingly expensive entertainment.
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Fewer used games sales? Check.
More new game sales? Check.
More money for publisher? Check.
Less money for Gamestop? Check.
They might restrict it only to popular games, but the end is the same.
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From here on out, if there's a game that I want and it has install limits then I'll only buy it used. It's legal; I still get to play the game; and my money does not go toward supporting this type of DRM.
Sorry, I really want to buy your games, but installation limits are over the line for me, and I will not pay you for that. I passed on a handful of games this year due to this issue, but now I'll be catching up.
-“… taken potential profits from developers and left it in the hands of retailers.”
-“The president sees a solution …”
-“Epic is making its own strides …”
These words imply that retailers’ used-game sales are definitely a problem. Is that a fact, or is it more accurate to say that game developers think it's a fact?
Aside from the fact that it’s not illegal for GameStop to sell used games, there are plenty of reasons for a person to be skeptical of this problem. Just like in the PC piracy debate, how much of those “potential profits” would developers see if people could only buy new games?
And what about gamers? If developers include one-use codes for unique weapon art in new games, that’s one thing, but making a gamer pay $20 to be able to finish a game that he or she bought is garbage.
Game developers like Epic deserve support, but this problem isn’t clear-cut enough to use such loaded language here. I realize this is basically a post reporting on some other Web site’s content, but it comes across as advocacy journalism, and it still resides right next to Shacknews’ original reporting on the front page.
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Remember, Dell forums are 99% bitch threads about product issues. But the total number of people who post is less than 5% (and I am being generous). Why? because people who are happy don't complain .. and usually don't say anything.
This is a savvy game site. Most of us are up on the issues. The majority of the people buying games at gamestop have no clue.
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At $60 a game, there are too many games fighting for too little money in my wallet, trades help. Otherwise, I wait until they hit less than $30 before I buy them. I am still waiting on COD4 for PC to hit $30 before I can get it, great game I'm sure but I will wait for it to drop before I purchase it. If I could have traded some PC games towards it I would have had it months ago at full cost, instead here I wait.
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make games that are insteresting for a longer period of time and used sales become less of a problem.
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I'm guessing that in the near future, when you buy a physical copy of Gears of War 8 or whatever, the box will contain a manual and a redemption code and nothing else. You buy the game, it ties it to your Live account, you download it, and off you go.
I'm also expecting them to completely bankrupt Blockbuster by offering rentals downloaded directly to your xbox, right through Live. Valve is, in my estimation, already gearing up for this with their "free TF2 weekend" promotions.
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i recently jumped on the buy-used-games once they've been out a while from the 2nd hand retailers
on top of that, gamestop on fort hood offers a military discount
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Devs are trying to come up with incentives to encourage people to buy new games over used games (which are a few dollars cheaper in many cases). Thats it. Its going to take some trial and error to find a way to incentivize it that is acceptable to gamers.
The stores that really get to devs are the game shops that buy used games very cheaply from gamers and resell them just under full price. They actively encourage people to buy used instead of new as they make great money on it. Dev and pubs don't limited leverage, as they want the stores are the distrobution channel for new products as well.
This is a raw economic issue. It is much more profitable for stores to buy games cheap and resell them at near full value. There is no almost no reason for a customer to buy a new game over a used game.
For PC games, digital distrobution is a good path. Unfortunately, this can become all or nothing. Game stores my not be happy with publisher selling a game over Steam instead of offering it on the stores own online channel. Price is another issue - drop price on the Steam version and the store may simply refuse to carry games from that publisher in the future. Its going to take a few years for this to settle.
Why is the best FPS game ever from the year 2000? The best RTS from 1998? The best RPG from 2000? I could go on.
Then we get the devolution of the medium as a whole with DRM, ads and now this. All borne out of publisher - well, what? I won't say greed. Greed is an anti-concept. There's nothing wrong with wanting to maximize profits. All businessesstrive toward prosperity, on the large scale it's what makes us the Western world instead of some feces-covered collection of bamboo huts. But big game, hotshot publishers introduce a foreign object straight into the rectum of art that gaming, after all, is.
In July 2000 I bought Diablo 2 for about $35-40 or whatever the ratio of SEK -> USD was back then. Blizzard said "thanks", told me to put a CD key into the installer and then they got the hell off my behind. Well, except for the patches and Battle.net they provided for the following 8 years. Admittedly Blizzard was a bit above average in that department but apart from the exceptional patch support, it wasn't far off from the par for the course.
Now I get treated like a pirate while the real pirates get the better deal. No thank you. If piracy and used sales bother you publishers so much, then either get on Steam, beat Steam, or shut up.
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Here are the facts;
-games cost a lot to make
-games are not high volume selling like movies or music
-the profit margin on a single game sale is very low
-games are cheap for what you get
The game industry has 2 choices, either restrict resale of used game or increase the cost of games by 2 or 3 times.
Stop comparing games to cars or other markets - they are different and do not work in the same way in many regards. If they didn't this wouldn't be an issue.
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... that and the other article on Shack today about the Harmonix founders getting $300M bonuses, I don't know how they will afford housing and food.
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Publishers and greedy fucks. Not developers. Most decent developers aren't in it for the money, or they'd do something a little more lucrative, like advertising/computer security.
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really??! you are going to bitch that you guys can't make profit from the sale of the same game twice?
hey epic... suck a fat one bitch. I'm pretty sure that one scrooge McDuck pool of money is enough.
Oh yeah and a screw you to EA for bricking my battlefield installs with your lousy addition of punkbuster over and over and over and over again.
there .. that should be enough bitching for tonight.
Steam Rules!
I traded in some old titles to Gamestop with an added bonus of 10% on top of that value, so that I could buy a new copy of Gears2. I'm sure a lot of others did as well. I just makes financial sense.
Epic should be pushing digital downloads via MS (or Sony) as an actual SOLUTION to the problem. I think that would be a much better use of their time and visibility.
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