News Epic: Second hand games are a huge issue

The number of online players compared with the number of sales. Plus the inflated figures of going to every torrent site and seeing how many seeders and peers there are whilst ignoring the fact that many torrent sites share swarms. So going to 5 sites and seeing that each has 20,000 in the swarm does not mean that 100,000 people have torrented the game. The actual number would be closer to 40,000.

 

So make games you don't actually need to sell. Look at the almighty Google Empire. They build it on free stuff!

 

When I buy a game I create image of the original disc and use virtual drive to play the game. Thanks to this, original disc is as good as new even after several years. I don't have to buy new disc since the original disc is in perfect condition. Does this count as lost sale=piracy too?

 

OK, **** this, enough of these whinging *******s. I will not buy any more games from any company who wont allow me to sell it on.

 

OMG, Epic people are morons. Buy our games, preferably 10 discs at once, but don't dare to use them and don't even think about selling it when you're bored with it. Whatever, I'm going to continue downloading and sharing their games.

 

In regard to the "Steam being the solution" I have to say that I can't agree.
Why? For one thing, asking a "full price" (54$) for a game such as Bioshock on Steam, while it's on sale on retailers for half that price or less and you actually get the physical product instead of just the download is hardly a solution or reasonable. Yes okay, that's just one example, but that's why I can't agree it being a clean cut and easy solution just yet. Yes it is great, yes it has potential to be even better, but it's not ready yet.

As for the actual news, makes me sad. Pirates yarr are sad too.
Still have to agree that Epic could consider making BETTER GAMES that would actually appeal to people enough to merit BUYING them. I can't remember the last time I have been enthusiastic about anything they've put out.

Less whining how bad it is and more doing something about it. DRM in its current forms (if you care to call them that) is not a solution as it only limits the rights of the rightful owners. That is unless they think that consumers who buy a product don't own it anymore as others have pointed out as well.

 

Fact is, some of you need to get your head out of the sand, what he said was correct. Why say he is whining, what he said is true.

 

I hear the tear fairy coming to comfort Capps. Piracy wasn't a problem until the prices went up and the quality went down. Also the PC industry has gone down because of the console boom. PCs are now second class citizens to the gaming world.

GTA4 cost 100mil to make and they made 500mil+. That was pirated to hell and back, so how come Rockstar isn't having press releases on a weekly basis to complain? Unless I missed them, then please correct me.

 

how can they "do something about second hand games"? as someone said further up the thread, if you buy something you surely have the right to sell it on when your done with it. Hell, i buy pretty much all my games second hand (only GTA4 and SC4 made me overcome my anti full price console games stance) - why pay £40 for a game when you can wait a few weeks (or in times like this with so many cracking games out, a couple of months) and get it for £20-£30. If i couldnt do that, i wouldnt buy a single console game.

Games are meant to be one of the best cost to time activities around at the moment (tho i still think books are better at less than £10 for hours of entertainment), but lets face it thats just not true for most games. A 15hour game bought at £40 is ludicrous when compared to a decent online game like COD4 which u can pick up for £25 and get hundreds of hours out of it.

As for piracy...well theres nothing to be said there that hasnt been said a thousand times already.

 

This is getting ludicrous now, "combat the second hand market"? Why stop at games, we can do this across the board. Cars,boats,planes,houses, we can have contracts drawn up to insist the old one is destroyed when we are done with it, Ford,barret,Boeing etc are going to have a field day.

They want it both ways, If you pirate it its the same as stealing a physical object but if you want to sell it then suddenly all you own is the right to play the game and not a physical object.

Its never enough for those whinging idiots, First they ditch pc games to cream more money off of console exclusives and now they are slagging off one of the core concepts of the console market. If they carry on like this they will run out of customers.

 

It's a tricky one really. If I paint a picture or knit a jumper and sell it to the store, I've already been paid. I'm not entitled to be paid a second time for something just because the person who bought my stuff sells it back to the store or onto a 3rd party. Make one thing, get paid once. The idea of me getting paid everytime a new person buys the painting from it's last owner is kind of silly isnt it?

I appreciate the amount of work the games company puts in to making a game (most of the time) but it's greedy to want to be paid everytime someone new buys the game (be it new or second hand) as opposed to everytime they buy the game from the creator (new). There's an important difference.

Every second hand game that the store sells (for a price way to close to retail if you ask me) has already been paid for once. What happens to it after that is none of the games company's business. The problem is that the games makers are trying to find a way to get money for 'Lost Sales'. The majority of lost sales come from 3 places, Piracy, Second Hand Market and Not buying the game (which may or may not actually be a lost sale if you didnt want to own the game).

Piracy is the only one of these that the games companys are correct in being annoyed about. Whilst not all Pirates would have actually paid for the game if they hadn't stolen it there is still a percentage of the pirated games that could have been sales were it not for the Piracy.

The second hand market's 'lost sales' arent the games companys sales at all. They've already sold the game once. End of story.

Eh... sorry for the minor rant

 

A little OT but I'm not buying another game from EA until they stop doing this limited install nonsense, as an avid PC enthusiast I build, rebuild and format and an unbelievable rate, it doesn't matter if a game has 1, 2 or 20 installs for me, I'll still use them up and have to justify my existence to some pleb, no thanks.

Back to the topic in hand - piracy is a problem in the games industry, as it is in most entertainment media industries ( music, video, etc ), but simply not releasing on a platform certainly is a move in the wrong direction and is not really a solution to the problem. I also take offence to Dr Capps inferring that the solution is a steam like platform when such a platform already exists (and they still refuse to release/develop the game for PC)

 

Fair point.... occasionally... these days.

I used to think the same in STEAM's early days, and that's because what you say was nearly always the case.

These days though, I find it hard to find much of a difference between STEAM's prices and those at Play, Game, or Amazon.

for example, Fallout 3 is $50 and £25 on etailers, Crysis is roughly the same, as is Warhead, Left for Dead etc....

Obviously they've worked on their pricing processes.

The only thing that bothers me now is our falling value of the pound.

Based on previous long-term history it was always reasonable to consider $2=£1, roughly, these days it's more like $1.50=£1.00, in which case you end up paying more. That's more the fault of our incompetent and short-sighted politicians than anything else though as our economy is receeding almost four times more than our peers, which is why I still consider the former long-term estimate as the figure that represents a reasaonable longer-term value to compare STEAM's prices.

That's the next step for Valve's pricing model for STEAM I guess; include currency exchange rate variations based on region in order to remain competitive.

Also, don't forget the nice one-off deals and introductory offers, and the seamless integration and community aspect, and mod support, patch-free gaming, blah, blah, blah...

The main reason I think that other devs, and publishers especially, are bitching and bleeting ridiculous nonsense is that they haven't figured out how to compete with Valve properly and are desperately trying to level the playing field with scant regard for the doing the right thing.

Based on that assumption, it 's nothing more than a competitive strategic move that has nothing to do with serving their customers, attacks their primary channel (videogame stores), and further holds them back fro mtaking the right moves.

Personally, it smacks of corporate arrogance led by ageing has-beens who need to be replaced with competent businessmen instead of trying to drag everyone back on pain of DRM, legal action, and outrageous control suggestions.

I sincerely hope to hear one day that companies like Epic get bought out at fire-sale prices, with no future for their, fankly, damaging "leadership"; those who make decisions in the organisation, not a suggestion that they are or have ever been leaders in this industry.

 

Stupid criminals like n3mo are taking care of there not being any games for the PC being available for d/ling and sharing in the not so far future.

If there wasn't this insane amount of game piracy, game devs wouldn't even need to complain about the 2nd hand games market.

I really don't understand why these stupid f*cks stealing games do not understand that in the end they will be hurting themselves. I also cannot understand how they can so blatantly ignore that they are taking away the base of other people's livelihood. They just give a damn about other people's hard work, they are parasites w/o conscience and social competence, they only react to direct threats and punishment.

Just look at the numbers for Crysis. It's a fun game. It works. And if people want to try it first and find they like it, they should purchase it. If they think it's too expensive, wait 9 months and you will get it from the bargain bin. It will still be a great game 9 months from now.

But that's not the point for these hell bred software pirates. They want to satisfy their greed for free and have others pay the price.
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@iwog: Ok, make that 8:1 pirated/purchased Crysis copies. Is that anywhere significantly better? NO!

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@Teq: If you're too dumb to revoke the license before reformatting, your fault. Don't blame the game publisher for it. Guys like you pretend they're so upset about getting screwed when in fact they don't, but prefer to completely ignore why it has come that far - and that's because of retards like you.
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Btw, neither do I work for the computer gaming industry, nor do I make money with their products. I am just so upset how you selfish worth-less-than-nothings make life hard for honest people like me.

 

Contradiction?

The reason Steam is so successful is because they charge the full retail price for games that you *cannot* sell on.

QFT.

Here, here!

You can get some decent prices on Steam, but generally they are slightly above the average retail price (more so for us in the UK now the £ is dropping back) - but the key difference is that you can sell your retail game on if you don't like it/finish it/need cash for the next game.

I've got no problem with Fallout3 DRM nor did I have with the Bioshock DRM (nor did the guy who bought it off me). Providing DRM doesn't screw my machine up (Starforce) I don't mind. I wish I could avoid needing a DVD in the drive all the time, but it's not the end of the world. The steam alternative (losing from 50% - 75% of the game's value as resale) makes gaming uneconomical for me, and more importantly, offends my sense of natural justice.

Note that EMI moan about piracy but don't try to prevent me selling my CDs to other people. Nor do Penguin books worry that I might lend my books to other people. Last I heard, Kanye West was still just about managing to buy his bling, and Girls Aloud are still able to afford to make ends meet. I hear Michael Crichton died a wealthy man. And to my knowledge, Daniel Craig hasn't resorted to an evening bar job to pay the bills.

So why do Epic, EA, Ubisoft and pals all struggle on the proceeds or retail game sales?

If they want to stop piracy, they should open up Steam so that games will be trade-able, and there would be no resistance from the paying punters.

 

Steam is not the holy grail that people keep say it is. L4D is $49.99 at the moment, which is about £28. If you look on play, it is £23 at the moment, can you guess where I'm getting it from? Steam should be cheaper then retail.

The problem is that the games are getting higher prices those days, and a lot of them just are not worth the money. Gears one was good, but the single player mode was just too short. I don't think it was good value for money (which is why I got it second hand for £28) if Gears was £30 new I would have got it new and not felt so bad at how short it was.

So, yes there are solutions to those problems, but no one has really implemented them in a way that works.

 

What would you suggest in the event of a HDD or mobo failure?

Fixed.

 

I get the feeling EPIC is still bitter about UT3 sucking so hard. The fact was that they had made the game so bloated over the years that people were bored of it. Not only that but unlike the older versions which felt stable and ran decently on a wider variety of machines, UT3 was more suited to high end machines and didn't impress as many people because of this. After all an FPS needs to be smooth and fast so killing a lot of your market is a bad idea.

Imo not having to pay any royalties on PC games is another bonus, also you can't really rent PC games or return them to shops which work in developers favour. Why can't they moan about the publishers cuts of the products. After all the people who put time and effort into making these games are they ones that deserve the kudos, they then get screwed over.

I've moved over to my 360 since GTA 4 (PC is aging a bit) and it pains me to pay £10+ more for a game everytime I buy it on console but I do. £40-50 is a lot for a game given the market.

 

i never really considered the fact that steam games cant be traded before people mentioned it in here. When you combine that with the cost, which you'd really expect to be lower than retail due to reduced transport costs/store markup, it does indeed make it alot less appealing than i had previously imagined. I have never really tried to sell on PC games due to the whole CD Key thing, theres not really any way to be sure the previous owner hasnt just kept the key. I really like the idea that cjmUK mentioned regarding implementing a trading system of some sort within steam - difficult to implement i dont doubt but that plus some more competitive pricing would truly make it the only way to buy games.

 

If ive read the article right there saying for every legal copy of crysis there were 20 people playing a pirated version?! that would make what 30 million(ish) pirates playing the game! im finding that hard to believe!! like has been said the movie industry has pretty much the same problems: films cost $millions to make id bet more people pirate a movie than a game, and as far as i know the dont punish you for buying a dvd, i can play it in whatever player i like. and when im done with it i can sell it on.
None of this is new it just looks like there struggling for excuses tbh