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News Pre-owned games blamed for falling sales

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by CardJoe, 28 Jun 2010.

  1. eternum

    eternum *blam* shotgun fanhole

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    This. I'm surprised that sales aren't down much further than this. So people are buying 20% fewer games than during the last console generation with the same userbase, while prices for those games have risen 30-50% since then. Wages certainly have not gone up by that margin, and the economy is crap. They should be thanking their lucky f***ing stars that sales aren't down further instead of blaming yet another scapegoat.

    It's not the greed that gets me (corporations exist to make money), it's the wanton head-in-the-sand stupidity that just makes me want to choke these people.
     
    Elton likes this.
  2. DXR_13KE

    DXR_13KE BananaModder

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    And their capacity to influence the law.
     
  3. Sloth

    Sloth #yolo #swag

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    Wut.

    I bought Red Dead Redemption new for $56 a few weeks ago. This is a pretty standard retail price for a new release game (less than three months old). So going back to last generation, let's look at games being supposedly 50% less. Note, not half of current, but rather 150%-50%=100% of last generation price, aka one third of current. Comes out to be about $37.33. I don't know about anyone else here, but I've never paid as little as $37 for a new release big name PS2 title! Am I the only one who really hasn't seen prices rise that far?


    But my own guess is that people just want 20% less games. Multiplayer games are getting far more popular on consoles. Why buy three games for 50 hours of singleplayer fun when Modern Warfare 2 can give you that with online play? I'd also blame DLC. Why buy a new game when you can just get the DLC for your current game and keep playing that?
     
  4. HourBeforeDawn

    HourBeforeDawn a.k.a KazeModz

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    Agree 100% I wish PC games were more second hand friendly or what would be great is if on Steam, they gave you the ability to give your game to another steam account once your done with it but I could see how this could be abused but still would be nice.
     
  5. greyhavens24

    greyhavens24 What's a Dremel?

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    Firstly, all statistics can be massaged to get the results to fit the study. What vendors were sampled? What is classed as a "New" Sale? Budget label titles are released quite rapidly once initial sales drop and we also see prices of games drop as uptake drops - are these counted or are these not included?

    I also note that this Games Analyst Firm doesn't actually state who they did the study for. Let's face it, if you are a market analyst, then you are normally undertaking market research or analysing certain statistics at the behest of a client because the client wants to find something out about their market or to adapt their business model to fit current market trends. So who commissioned it? I am pretty sure Cowen and Company didn't invest time and money finding this out just for us lot to talk about it, one of the big publishers without a doubt commissioned this.

    I'm pretty sure that second hand sales in Game or Gamestation do indeed affect New Sales, HOWEVER I'm also pretty confident in saying that Tesco or Asda to name a couple probably sell more NEW games than Game for example. It's simple math really: more outlets+longer opening times+bigger buying power+higher footfall=bigger sales.

    For this data to have validity you have to state the source of your results. For example if you see say an Oil of Olay advert that says 90% of women think this make them look younger, they will show on the advert that from a group of x women surveyed as a broad example.

    Secondly they are saying that the userbase is broadly similar to the previous generation consoles. Perhaps thats because the hardened gamers all upgraded FROM these previous generation consoles to the next generation version. Lets face it if you are a casual gamer or a noob (Nothing against Wii's but they are directly marketed at this type of gamer because they are so accessible), you buy a Wii in general, and I notice that the Wii and it's predecessor the Gamecube do not get a mention in this article. But surely the Wii suffers from the same problem if it's as endemic as Cowen and Company would have us led to believe

    Which leads me to the conclusion that I would seriously doubt that this research is any more than someone like Activision or EA commisioning the research and manipulating the results to get a headline.

    There, that's Cowen and Company told!! :p
     
  6. borandi

    borandi What's a Dremel?

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    What the hell is this, Joe Martin? EA announced they believed this was the case several weeks ago. And now you're just quoting an MCV article? Welcome to original research - only at Bit-tech :)
     
  7. ZERO <ibis>

    ZERO <ibis> Minimodder

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    If the games were good why would I sell them to someone else?
     
  8. deadsea

    deadsea What's a Dremel?

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    The article over at MCV is rather low on details. How does one make the leap from more sales in the past as compared to the present. It must be 2nd hand sales!!! Couldn't be any of the other million or so reasons.

    Anyone got a link to the original report?
     
  9. maximus09

    maximus09 Forever n00b

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    the only way the games industry is going to get round this is by implementing DRM on console games or have games downloadable from one of the live services. Then, not only will you not be able to lend your game to your friends, but you will also not be able to re-sell. I learnt this the hard way by lending my COD4 to a friend (on PC) after getting it back and re-installing it a few months later to play it again, the serial code wouldn't work anymore :(

    I might add that in consumer law it is the legal right of a consumer to re-sell a product as second hand after purchase. Interesting how they may get around this law? Well anway, with a conservative government now it shouldn't be too hard to change the law in favour of the big rich companies.
     
  10. BlackMage23

    BlackMage23 RPG Loving Freak

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    The want you to buy new games until you bleed!
     
  11. Bob1234

    Bob1234 What's a Dremel?

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    Read the license agreements of some products, they say you have been granted a license to run it but do not own it outright and the license is non transferable.

    So by not owning the product, you cant resell it.
     
  12. Anfield

    Anfield Multimodder

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    If they really wanted to kill the second hand market, its very simple, they just need to start putting bigger harddisks in consoles and then move to digital distribution.
     
  13. kingjohn

    kingjohn mod this sucker

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    i havnt read all the posts , but who would but im sure some were in amongst that lot there the word recession are the games sellers stupid houses are cheaper why not games .
     
  14. baggyman

    baggyman What's a Dremel?

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    Im surprised there hasnt been any complaints about preowned in the past few weeks - its been a bit quiet on that front - everyone was shouting about it for a whole week!
     
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