Studio Chief Says Used Games Are Worse Than Piracy

[CoFree]

Studio Chief Says Used Games Are Worse Than Piracy, Urges Ban

Electronic Arts recently announced the controversial decision to make buyers of its pre-owned sports games pay an extra $10 to gain access to online gameplay and other features. Now another publisher has sounded off about the evils of used games and how the industry has to take drastic action to prevent customers from "taking advantage" of gamemakers.

Blitz Games Studio's co-founder Andrew Oliver stated that used games are slashing the revenue to publishers and developers by 75 percent. Blitz is best known for producing Dead to Rights: Retribution, Karaoke Revolution, and a series of SpongeBob SquarePants titles.

When asked about piracy, Oliver responded, "Arguably the bigger problem on consoles now is the trading in of games. I understand why players do this, games are expensive and after a few weeks of playing you’ve either beaten it, or got bored of it so trading it back in to help pay for the next seems sensible when people are short of cash."

Oliver's estimate of 75 percent losses comes from his assumption that games are traded in on average 4 times (the real figure is likely not this high), which he says would mean that the developer/producers' cut would be cut in four (game retailers typically keep all the proceeds from sales of used titles).

He concludes, "So while retail may be announcing a reasonable season, the money going back up the chain is a fraction of what it was only a few years ago. This is a much bigger problem than piracy on the main consoles."

Oliver says that a solution is to sell consumers digital copies of games through outlets such as Valve's Steam Client. In doing so, he said customers can effectively be banned from reselling their games.

Is his statement fair, or illogical? One thing's for sure, gamers will be sure to chime in on this one.

[slowmo]

Computer games cant be traded in because of the EULA you have to agree to when installing the game, console games are the only games that can be legally traded in. So digital distribution would do nothing to combat the problem unless your taking xbox arcade type games, but those cant be traded in anyways.

Simple solution would be to make good games people want to play multiple times and not trade in till many months after release, instead of throw away crap games, or for companies like EA to offer their own trade in program.

[HaGGardSmurf]

Another simple solution would be online multiplayer.

The only reason I ever keep playing games ive beat is for the multiplayer. If the game is single player only, once Ive beaten it I dont really ever play it again...

[trailz]

In deciding to sell my games, I look at how they have held value over time. In considering their value, I look at how the content has grown. The biggest threat to a game's long term value is the decision by the online service provider (Live, PSN, etc.... ) to completely lock out all community produced content.

When Live first launched, the first game I bought for it was Unreal Championship. I loved the PC version for the mods and add-ons, and since this was essentially a port of the PC version, I had hope that some of that content would find its way to the Xbox version. However, over the life of the game, a total of four maps were released. At launch, I would have considered an eventual total of 400 low.

The next major event for me on Live was Halo 2. First, I want to get it out of the way, I hated Halo 2. Matchmaking is the worst thing ever to happen to online game play. All the matches are exactly the same, it takes too long to find a match, and by far worst of all, there is no way to set up a public custom match. Now, not only are you forced to play with only the official content, you have to play the official content the official way. I was patient with this, I played for a couple months, but in the end I decided that it was garbage. Looking back at my time on Championship, almost all of my matches were privately hosted custom matches. The DLC was at least tolerable, Bungie did better than Atari(?) by eventually making the new maps free.

Horde mode in Gears of War 2 is the most fun I have had on Live since Unreal. Matches lasted, and the team balance was no where near as critical. Unfortunately, this came to an end pretty quickly. I had the bad luck of buying the game a a few weeks before the GOTY version was released.

DLC is the only way that content is still added to the game, but the value is almost totally to the benefit of the developer. Seriously, it looks like you can only profit on DLC. By locking out the community, you have no competition!! Who would pay $10-15 dollars for a handful of maps if there were any free content available? I suppose you could lose money if the advertising department goes way over budget.... The main problem is that DLC can not be sold or transferred. It increases the cost of the game, but only increases the *intrinsic* value of the game. You have to really love the game to buy the content, but that same content would mean nothing if you wanted to sell because you could not transfer any of it to the buyer.

For the reasons above related to DLC, the industry has developed itself into a situation where the value of its product can only go down. From comments I've read posted to gamespy.com's stories, I gather that more than a few gamers are at least semi-consciously aware of the situation. In short, the strategy is to either to wait to buy the game at a more reasonable price, perhaps with the DLC included, rent the game, or buy the game and sell it as soon as possible, because it will be worth less after every day.

I have more thoughts on the topic, but I'm probably approaching some hidden post size limit, so I'll leave it at this for now.

[CoFree]

thanks for the post man
good stuff

there is a limit but im not sure what it is.

the one thing i would add
of course we dont support it here ,but
there are a number of people that have turned from live and went
back to the old, get a game, play it for what it is worth

when you add that many are getting games off line by questionable means
i think we will see a bigger gap in the game players
a on live, by the book with DLC and all
and
those that download games and say to hell with live and DLC

[tonyuk73]

Simple solution would be to make good games people want to play multiple times and not trade in till many months after release, instead of throw away crap games, or for companies like EA to offer their own trade in program.

i got a half way through reading this and thought the same,to the point where i looked at my game collection and out of the 80 games that are there only about 20% are the "dogs rod" and the rest crap,now i paid good money for these games but will not part with them for the thought of going down to 'game' or 'gamestation' with a game that was bought for £40 and then being told that its now worth a fiver to see it on the shelf again for £25, but i also see these game companies getting greedy and comes the question do you really own the game that you have bought.you should be able to do what you want with it youve paid for it . so keep them and sell them in bulk on e bay and cut out that middle man in the high street,how long will it be before there is a fee for us to pay to activate a game the plot gets bigger and more and more gaming will go underground if you know what i mean.thank god for homebrew.

[upsman1999]

I have to call full BS on that whole statement.Ok you go out and buy a game for $60 most game sell a ton of copys which mean the get there money 10 fold.Then you go and trade the game in someone else buys the same game for $54.99 so now they have made $114.99 off the same game and on top of that they will give a few things in DLC for free the rest you have to buy.So i guess what im looking for is where are they losing money...

[MrMiscellaneous]

I cant remember where,but there is a chart that shows how much game developers actually earn(what percent of the money) Services such as steam are amazing and so helpful to game developers,nearly all of the money actually goes towards the developers and they have such great deals!
Let me see if i can find the chart for onlive(although its iffy)gah i cant oh well

[trailz]

The developers make nothing at all on used games. They lose money because people are buying used instead of buying new. Additionally, people are selling their games very soon after purchase, so the developer loses out again because they are not going to sell them the DLC either.

I know the trade in value for the games is very very bad, but the reality of the situation makes a point. Enough people are willing to take a $30-40 loss (or more) on the sale of a $60 game for a nationwide multi-million dollar business to exist. Look at the picture in CoFree's original post. That is the story in every GameStop I have ever been in. There aren't just a few games or even a few dozen games. For all but the newest games, there is a used copy available. When you consider the volume of games that are no longer offered as new, the used game inventory is probably more than games being sold new.

Anyone work at GameStop and want to comment on that?

Understand that video games are a business. Like any business, any developer will be trying to get as much money as possible from the customer by giving them as little as possible. Likewise, the customer will be trying to get as much from their product as possible while paying as little as possible. That is capitalism. Video games take some special considerations, though. Developers can use the underlying technology to lock the customer into their product. (Think of something like a non-transferable or one-time use license key.)

I believe that we are seeing the beginning of a new business model for game developers. Lock-in, software as service, revenue stream... The concept is not new, but this increasing adoption is going to have a great effect. Developers will try to market their game as an 'experience' to be 'consumed.' There will be nothing to sell or trade in, you will only be able to stop playing or pay more for every little map back, mission pack, skin, expansion, etc...

This will hurt gamers and developers, though maybe not in the way you might expect. Though selling a game back to gamestop or something is a huge loss and not likely to contribute considerable funding toward the purchase of the next new game, perhaps the perception that this is the case is quite powerful? Gamespy wrote and an article joking that there are too many great games available. I think there is some truth to this, I seen many games I have wanted to buy, wanted to play, but did not simple because I did not think I could find the time. The price of the game made little difference. Developers are losing out because their is too much competition.

Destroying the used game market will destroy competition. We can already see the effects this will have. DLC being offered for old games has dropped in price very little, if at all. In some cases, it nearly matches the price of the game it is for. When only the developer is allowed to set the price, two things are most likely to occur: the price is either too high, or too low. Both lead to less profit than if the market had determined the *real* value of the product.

The black market rises naturally wherever artificial controls are placed on the market. As the situation is currently, I do not feel that lowering the price of new games will attract more legitimate buyers. I feel that when people say the games cost too much, they do not mean that they cannot afford the game, but that they cannot afford to buy *all* the games they want; there is too much choice. When the price is actually too high, this will drive customers away. Used games are available at just about every price point. Will 'new' games be, if the developers have their way?

I've said a lot on this topic, and that is because I consider this situation quite dangerous. Along with two other instances, I consider this attack on used gaming to be inspiring piracy. Gamers have already felt alienation by anti-piracy measures such as root-kit like DRM, easy to lose serials, and annoying disc checks. Whether you think gamers will go from buying used games to buying new games has to do with your evaluation of the consumer's moral sense; it should be clear that I do not think they will make the 'choice' the developers want them to make.

The other instances I spoke of as inspiring piracy are as follows. Sony's decision to remove OtherOS. Some who bought the console for this feature will feel cheated, and I do not think that Sony would want people paying attention firmware. The other is the emulator for the Wii: it runs Gamecube and Wii games at higher resolution than the console can.

[upsman1999]

I understand everyones consern on the used game sells,but If there is 50 copys of used games that just came out that means 50 people bought them new.Which in my eyes the publisher has already made there money it would seem they are just mad that Gamestop is making money also...

[nufcmickey]

I will keep this short and sweet but I want my pennies worth. Dam Greed is what it is. We all know what Pocket Hungry Mr gates is like. It wont be the developers brainwave it will be MS as per usual. Same as they have basically forced Turn 10 and other devs alike to take away our online freedom to try make it more sociable. Take the Multiplayer in Forza 3 for instance.

Greed.....Greed and even more Greeeeed !

[aTurgidKnave]

It's stuff like this that makes me wish I wasn't addicted to video games.

[technoe]

Ok I'm all for bashing developers when bashing is needed but leave Bill Gates out of this. Nearly ten years ago he cut his yearly earnings down to 100K/year. That's more than the average household but about a thousand times less than he was making. And the rest of his money goes to the charity his wife and him set up. So....stop bashing Gates. The man is a genius hands down and a generous one at that.