News THQ: No sympathy for second hand game buyers

What happens if you need to reinstall the game? Do you lose access to the free 'first hand' bits?

If not then what's to stop people giving the code to the person they sell the game to? If you have to authenticate it with THQ you can just say you had to reinstall windows or that you've bought a new PC and claim you are still the 'first hand' buyer.

 

seen it coming for years. As the Pre owned market grew.
Takes away a big pro for owning a console.
But hey welcome to the greed is good world of games.
On the plus side if they lose there console market they might get back to making great PC games.

 

I understand one-time codes and all but putting thing as they did is a bit off putting for me. After all if the game with this one-time code lays on the shelf for longer and gets discounted and we as consumer pay less then on the beginning, same as with used games. Developers are so often detached from realities of the market. After all I don't see hardware manufacturers doing the same. Take EVGA, you can un-register your hardware before you sell it and the buyer can re-register under his/her own name.

As I said, THQ saying that they don't care is never going to convince me (and I feel lots of people too) to buy their games.

 

They'd be like Microsoft and tell you tough ****, unless you can work something out.

 

If publishers want to put an end to the second-hand market, it's quite easy. Just use a system like the one DD sites and services use on PC, with the games tied to a specific account. You buy a new game, activate it online and it gets tied to your Xbox or Playstation profile. Problem solved.

 

There seems to be a lot of nerd-rage..

Almost as if people have forgotten that the second hand sales don't go anywhere near the publisher.

At all. That £35 second hand copy goes straight into the pocket of the establishment you bought it from. They typically make ~£10-15 on a reasonable condition, reasonably popular, game.

The publisher makes.. err.. £0 from second hand sales, why should they give a rats backside about second hand purchasers?

 

Because 2nd hand demand drives new purchases. Lots of gamers buy a new game at lanch and get bored after a week and then sell it back to a store of a friend etc. These guys know that they retain most of the value in the game if they sell back quite quickly so dont mind buying it new. If they couldnt retain the value in their investment as the game isnt worth anywhere near as much they may be alot more discerning with their purchases and therefore new game sales would go down. What the publishers are doing is more likely to dampen 1st time sales than promote them.

 

The rage is strong in this one.
Used game sales from one person to the other, be it via being friends, Facebook or through a (local) gaming website's forum adapts to this. BF: BC2 or ME2 with used codes? Worth less than a version with unused codes. The market fixes itself, as long as you stand up for yourself and demand the price lowered by the cost of the new code. Sellers are hurt a bit, but tbh, zero sympathy there, any money you get is better than nothing.

Who *is* hurt are stores buying and reselling games. I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but here in Belgium they rip you off both ways. Sell two week old game that cost you (at their own ridiculous prices) 55€, receive ~20€. Then they resell it for 45€. That's downright criminal, and I think publishers have much more of a problem with this versus 'private' trades or sales. Also: stop using the price policy of brick and mortar stores as an argument to vilify publishers.

New games devalue *incredibly* quickly, especially in online stores like Amazon and Play. FFXIII is £15 on Amazon right now, and there's plenty of other (fairly) recent games that are sub £20. Other than availability of older games, there is very little reason to go for second hand games.

 

Not yet, no. But if this takes off then I'm sure you'll see an new "Feature" in Blu-Ray to stop 2nd hand sales.

 

What the hell are you talking about. I don't care about the first hand buyers wallets here. I'm trying to say that the developer/publisher do not get a single penny from second hand sales. Yes, you're buying their game legitimately, but you are not paying them a single penny. Why should they care about you?

That's like dunking your balls in someones drink, and demanding free stuff off them. They're going to tell you to get lost, in much less charming words than that.

Second hand demand does NOTHING to drive new sales. Stores don't say "Buy the game new, complete it, sell it back to us, because this chap doesn't want to pay full whack for the game". They're facilitating a market they know they can make money in - And that is all they're doing.

They're lining their pockets, not passing anything to the developer.

 

Lets hope the motor industry doesn't start moaning about second hand sales.

 

Second hand games put money back into the pockets of the people who buy the new games. This then allows them to pay the high price of a new game and buy more new games.

Subsequently cheaper second hand games increase uptake of less popular titles contributing to a more vibrant online gaming experience. Less people playing your game online generally makes for a worse experience in my opinion.

By increasing the price of second hand games it makes them almost as much as a new game and therefore pretty worthless.

Why does the gaming industry think it can be so much different from every other consumer product out there that gets resold?
If anyone honestly thinks this kind of initiative helps anyone but those at the top they're most likely mistaken. Look at the call of duty team, the Foxconn workers or any other large corporation. It's about money and if they can get away with lining their pockets even more they will. Generally I'm a fan of capitalism but when it hits the global stage it seems to go horribly wrong.

 

The pre-owned games market does hurt publishers. But overpriced games hurt my wallet, a £55 price tag is common place these days where as I can pick up the same game pre-owned for £30. why don't you try selling us games at a reasonable price?

Here is some bad maths (not taking into account markup, production, etc etc).

5 people buy cod6
2 buy it new for £55 RRP
3 buy it pre-owned for £30
£110 goes to publishers (yes I know this is completely wrong just amuse me)

with a new pricing structure of £30 RRP

5 people buy cod6
All 5 buy it new for £30 RRP
£150 goes to publishers
EVERYONES A WINNER! (Except Gamestation, we've just royally f*cked them over)

I'm more than happy for you to put these codes into games but not if you think you can carry on ripping us off, we will just stop buying your games and you will be the ones that lose out in the end.

 

Actually economics 101 here, if you buy some thing for £50 and its still worth £30 when you sell it you've only spent £20 buy the same item with a resale value of £0 then you're £50 out of pocket.

Now you decide you want a new game do you get the one with a resale value or none? the one with no or limited resale value is much more expensive than the other. Thats why the second hand market drives new sales as the person who just got £30 for there old game only needs to add another £20 to get another.

 

This has been shown by how effective steam sales are in driving huge demand and jumps in purchases up to 1000% lots of times. Mircrosoft is making this mistake with Kinect as every xbox 360 owner would buy one for £50 but for £129 very few will.

Movie and music publishers are making the same error, blu rays, dvds and cds would fly off the shelves if movies and albums were priced at £5 ish to start off with. Instead people pirate when they would buy if the price was within a reasonable range. I'm not defending piracy here just that people have a limited amount of money to spend and if you can get it directed at your industry as you provide good value then your doing the right thing.

 

The point about Steam is a good one, it shows how price sensitive that games market is. Lower the price and attract loads of business - simple.

The point about Blu Ray is also true, they are the most popular DVD format in the States and this is basically due to the low price, in Europe they are just too expensive to see mass market takeup of the same scale.

 

Are you deliberately not paying attention?

"I don't care about the first hand buyers wallets here."

It doesn't matter what their wallet is doing, it's the second hand buyers that decide to remove sales from the developer/publisher by not paying them a single penny with second hand sales. The second hand sales market is so large that it is feasible for a person to not ever pay a developer anything, and yet still play the games. The developer/publishers are trying to recoup the loss that they are feeling when people, ill educated ones at that, are presented with a choice of "New for £40" or "Second hand for £35" (Which, regularly, is the difference in new games). The developer doesn't see a penny of the second hand sales, and the customer doesn't realise this, and feels right at home saying "I spent £35 on your game, give me DLC for free" when, in actual fact, the customer has given the developer/publisher, £0 for their game, and is demanding things for free.

Example:

Publisher A publishes Developer B’s game, they produce 400,000 copies of the game. They ship all 400,000 to Distributor C, and within a week those 400,000 copies have been sold. Now, say 150,000 copies are returned and resold as second hand games. So, there are 250,000 copies of the game sold and not “traded in”, and 150,000 available for, say, £10 less than retail. They’re going to sell faster because they’re cheaper. The Distributor isn’t going to order 400,000 for week two – They already have 150,000. It’d be awful business sense to buy another 400,000 when you have 150,000 already (If you don't believe me, here's an example from Starcraft II: 912,008 copies sold in the first week, 210,461 copies sold in the second). If you only wanted 400,000 at any one time, all you’re going to order is at most 300,000 (Some people will only buy new). That’s 100,000 sales lost already. A quarter of the total sales lost because of second hand games. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re fuelling a development studio, a quarter of your sales disappearing is a big concern, when you consider the amount of people that need paying.

THQ cut 250 staff after SR2 didn't sell as well as they expected, and a very conservative estimate for their yearly salary is $7,500,000 (Assuming $30,000 average for 250 employees). That is, effectively, a weeks sales for SR2. That's how little they get back from each new copy sold.

Second hand market gives them even less - Nothing at all.

Edit: What you described doesn't demonstrate that second hand demand is driving new sales, in fact, all it does is demonstrate that people are cheapskates and don't like paying full whack for new games. Second hand games are not guaranteed sellers - Just check the bargain bins for the umpteen million copies of previous years sports games, which is why the amount a store will give you for a game is so damned low, compared to what they ask for it.

THQ are saying, here: "Second hand buyers aren't paying us, why should we give a toss what they think." It is one hundred percent true, and utterly fair.

 

This has been hashed and re-hashed before in other threads, so I'll just quote myself:

 

This kind of talk really pisses me off. THQ sell someone a copy of a game and they make their money on it. But what's this?! After this person finished their game, they sold it on to someone else! Argh! No! A sale of our product that we made no money from! Argh! We must cripple all our future games somehow to stop this kind of larceny!

This is just plain greedy. They sold (not rented or licensed or lent or leased) that copy of the game to the original owner and it is entirely up to them what they do with it after that. Any attempt to prevent that is really them just trying to circumvent our consumer rights.

My personal nightmare - pencils that come with a 20% royalty on anything you write with them.

Yeah, I'm pissed off.

 

And you are using the same ridiculous reasoning the games pubs do

Not caring about customers wallets is just bloody stupid! Of course you need to be sensitive to your purchasing public or else you end up where the music industry is and the games industry is moaning about .

A non buyer<> a lost sale. There are >6 billion people on the planet should they all be buying **** Game Returns?

Put it another way if the game only costs me in real terms £30 i'll buy another if it costs me £50 I wont NOW that is a lost sale.