1. This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More.

News Pre-owned games blamed for falling sales

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

  1. Bob1234

    Bob1234 What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    30 Jul 2008
    Posts:
    53
    Likes Received:
    1
    I can see one of their "solutions" to the problem.

    Sell the game disc at almost nothing, say £5, then require payment of an additional £30-35 to actually unlock the content.

    This totally kills the resale market as the next person to buy it would still have to pay £30-35 to get the content, as theyre on a different console.
     
  2. Altron

    Altron Minimodder

    Joined:
    12 Dec 2002
    Posts:
    3,186
    Likes Received:
    61
    Why not just make the game better, so that people don't want to sell the game?

    I have a couple games that I've had for years, and that if you walked up to me right now and offered to give me a full refund on them, I'd tell you to get bent, because I still like playing the online multiplayer long after I beat the SP campaign.

    If you're designing games with the intentions of people playing them for a few months then losing interest and selling them secondhand, then don't act offended when people do so. If you're going to turn out a game that you continue to support and continue to add content to, then secondhand sales won't exist.

    It's the Keynesian economics of gaming that they don't understand. There is a bunch of people who will buy the games the day they come out for $59.99. However, they do so because they plan on playing through it for a few months, then selling it, and getting some return on that investment. They know this up-front, so they are looking at an actual game cost of $40, since they know they will definitely get a good return on selling it. And, once they sell it, they will probably use the money towards the next big release. Selling their old games partially funds the purchase of their new games. Once they sell the old game, they can't play it anymore. If you make it difficult or impossible to sell the old game, then they can still play it, and they'll be more inclined to keep playing it versus just letting it rot on their shelf. They see the new game they want, realize they have to sell their old game to afford it, so they do so, and since the selling prices are lower, they take $40 out of pocket to pay the difference. If they are stuck with their old games, they won't be as inclined to buying new ones.

    Then, there are a bunch of people who buy mainly used games, because they're cheaper and they don't mind being half a year or so behind the newest games. The game studios don't make direct money from these people, but it sure helps them indirectly by improving console sales. There are people I knew who if they aleways had to pay full retail release price for every game would not own a console. I bought an Xbox back when you could still buy them used, for the sole purpose of playing the bargain bin $5, like GTA San Andreas or Forza Motorsport. If they were going to make me pay $50 for those games, no thanks, I won't buy the console. As more people buy consoles, more games are developed for them, and there is a larger consumer base, so it is still a bonus for the game manufacturers. And, it's unlikely that these people will NEVER buy a brand new game. They might prefer to buy second-hand, but they'll probably end up buying a couple of the less expensive new games if they get excited enough about them.
     
  3. CharlO

    CharlO What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    21 Oct 2009
    Posts:
    97
    Likes Received:
    1
    For real! Librarys are killing book sales!

    MY GOD SHUT UP!

    Do some quality software and I'll buy it, most games suck either in hisory development or is bug filled and no support!
     
  4. lacuna

    lacuna Minimodder

    Joined:
    9 Aug 2004
    Posts:
    687
    Likes Received:
    18
     
  5. NuTech

    NuTech Minimodder

    Joined:
    18 Mar 2002
    Posts:
    2,222
    Likes Received:
    96
    True, but the way it's perceived by the publisher is that they (the second-hand gamer) haven't contributed towards the online costs so therefore they shouldn't get access to the multiplayer and/or free DLC.

    Right or wrong, that's just the way the publishers perceive it - so they're going to continue to do all they can to fight the second-hand market.
     
  6. Madness_3d

    Madness_3d Bit-Tech/Asus OC Winner

    Joined:
    26 Apr 2009
    Posts:
    1,040
    Likes Received:
    36
    Because the games are £10 -£20 more!!!
     
  7. Kilmoor

    Kilmoor lurker

    Joined:
    12 Jan 2010
    Posts:
    52
    Likes Received:
    2
    sigh... yawn... Cowen and Co, pull your heads out of your bums. Crappy games = crappy sales.
    ^^ what he said, except spelled correctly.
     
  8. DXR_13KE

    DXR_13KE BananaModder

    Joined:
    14 Sep 2005
    Posts:
    9,139
    Likes Received:
    382
    They also fail to notice that we are in the middle of a f***ing recession...
     
    Last edited: 28 Jun 2010
  9. Flibblebot

    Flibblebot Smile with me

    Joined:
    19 Apr 2005
    Posts:
    4,825
    Likes Received:
    292
    Wrong. If I buy a game and keep playing it for 12 months, how is that different (in terms of ongoing costs) to if I play the game for 6 months and then sell it to someone else who then plays that game for another 6 months? In terms of the overall cost to the publisher, there is absolutely no difference.

    The idea that extra costs to the publisher are caused by second-hand users is entirely fallacious - the transfer of ownership from one user to another is completely transparent to the publisher.
     
  10. Tokukachi

    Tokukachi Minimodder

    Joined:
    20 Jun 2007
    Posts:
    225
    Likes Received:
    4
    In 2003 I worked as a manager for the largest UK Games Retailer, and was also responsible for pre-owned across the region and I can tell you this is complete crap. Pre owned sales in 2003-05 were massive, this is when they let the stores set the prices and trade in values, and we were regularly hitting over 30% pre-owned.

    Also, around this time, Argos and Woolworths dropped the prices of all new/recent console games from £39.99 to £29.99, and all the other high street retailers followed suit, massively boosting sales of new stock. Also, games were generally better and longer then IMO.

    What annoys me these days is how expensive second hand games are. New is priced at £39.99 and the second hand copy at £37.99!! It annoys me most as you don't pay VAT on second hand sales, so the retailer, who probably paid less than £20 for the copy second hand, is making a clear £18+ in profit from the sale.

    Things like project $10 and all this complaining from the games industry is just the last, desperate, pathetic attempts to keep there archaic pricing model. Move with the times guys :)
     
  11. NuTech

    NuTech Minimodder

    Joined:
    18 Mar 2002
    Posts:
    2,222
    Likes Received:
    96
    Well, as indignant as it may make you, the publishers still disagree. That's the way they see it and they're going to do all they can to change it.
     
  12. Altron

    Altron Minimodder

    Joined:
    12 Dec 2002
    Posts:
    3,186
    Likes Received:
    61
    I think they're just pissed that the retailers beat them to the punch.

    Look at the car industry - it thrives on secondhand sales. And automakers don't get a cut of the profits from secondhand sales either (most dealerships, in the US at least, are privately owned).

    Just like GameStop and the other stores that will buy your old games, a dealership will buy your old car. That's because they can turn it around and sell it at a small profit, but more importantly, they're selling you a new car. You "trade in" your old one, take the biggest depreciation hit, and then the dealership gets you to buy a new car with a pretty good profit on, and gets a used car they can probably sell for moderate profit. they win on both rounds.

    Without the ability to "trade-in" your car towards the puchase of a newer car, new car sales would drop because it would be more inconvenient for you to have to sell your old car private-party (could easily be a month worth of craigslist ads and newspaper classifieds before finally selling it for 75% of your asking price). It's easier to bring your old game into the store, and give it to them, and get a discount on a new game than it is to try to sell the old game on your own. With the store acting as the middle-man, you can avoid scams from both ends.

    If you couldn't sell your car at all - if the car companies used a business model that prohibited second-hand sales - they would bleed money. People who normally might have kept a car for 4-5 years, then traded it in for a new one, will insteaad keep it for 8-10 years, until the maintenance costs approach the cost of just buying a new car.

    All the game companies need to do is look at the car industry and see how second-hand sales are helping their business by getting them more customers, and by providing an upgrade path for the heaviest consumers of their newest products.

    There are some differences related to physical content (the fact that the actual media is worthless, only the software on it) , but they could embrace it the same way Gamestop and EB Games has. They use trade-in games as a tool for selling their brand new games, the same way a car dealership will offer you a good trade-in value on your old car in order to get you to buy a new car from them. When there's a new game release, you can often bring in a couple older games, and give them to the store in exchange for a discount on your new game. The game manufacturer gets the same amount of money either way, but the retailer is able to offer you a discount on the basis that you value saving money on a new game more than you value saving your old games. Then they turn around, add a profit markup to the games you just traded in, and sell them to more people. It's a very profitable system.

    Game devs have a HUGE opportunity to capitalize on secondhand sales. They have the advantage that each individual copy of the game costs almost nothing. Gamestop has to pay vendor price to the devs to get the games, so they have to re-sell whichever old games get traded in. The game devs can just discard the trade-ins, and sell new copies of their older games in that place.

    If they implemented a system where you could get a discount for "trading in" your old games, in that they would simply de-activate your CD key, I think it would be popular. Then, take a cue from Steam, and offer a whole library of old games available at hugely discounted prices. For instance, you can buy the original Half Life games on Steam. The development for them is done. They cost absolutely nothing for Valve to distribute, because they don't have any employees working on them, they just have the code sitting on a fileserver somewhere, and they've already made a huge profit on it. So they go and they make it a few bucks, and people will pick it up for nostalgia, the same way people will comb through the $10 bargain bin at Gamestop for an old video game they might enjoy. There's no overhead cost, no marketing cost, no distribution cost, no support cost. Valve is selling those games at a 100% profit margin, and everyone is winning. People are enjoying playing nostalgic games for the cost of a cheap lunch, and they're making money.

    But, instead of capitalizing on the opportunity to make money from secondhand sales, most game companies are complaining that the opportunity exists. They had a chance to set up a very profitable system, using secondhand sales as an avenue to increase sales of brand new games and to increase their customer base, and instead of doing anything about it, they are just going to complain about it. They could do a car-dealership style of trade-ins towards new purchases, or they could even do something like a leasing program, where you buy a game for a limited amount of time, at a reduced cost (i.e. make it $15/month OR $60 forever), so that the crowd that plays the game then moves on to the next one quickly will tend to pay the monthly fee and won't ever re-sell, but the crowd that wants to keep the game will pay the flat fee, and either way secondhand sales would be reduced.

    It's survival of the fittest, man. Go down the street to Blockbuster and rent a DVD. Oh, wait, you can't. They're dead, because they clung to an antiquated distribution channel and decided to blame other companies rather than improving their system to beat them. As soon as Netflix came out, Blockbuster should have come out with an identical system, and tried to stay in step with them. Instead, they complained about it the same way these game devs complain about secondhand sales. By the time they realized that complaining wouldn't make the problem go away, Netflix was too entrenched in the market for them to get taken down, and Blockbuster's efforts at an online movie distribution system were too little, too late. Netflix killed Blockbuster, and then Redbox [it's a movie vending machine where it is $1 per night with a very limited selection, the idea being that if you want to pick up a popular movie to watch that night, you can go there 24 hours a day and get one. They realized that selection wasn't too important - everyone wants recent movies from the past ~3 years, and they realized that convenience was important, so they made it a 24 hour automated machine in a lot of grocery store parking lots, and they realized that nobody wants to rent movies for 3 days or 5 days or a week like Blockbuster did, they want to rent movies for one night, and they came up with a pricing structure to reflect that] put the nails in the coffin, and On-Demand video buried it. Within a decade, a huge chain of stores was obliberated because it thought it was too big to need to update its distribution and pricing model to compete with upstart companies.

    This gaming thing could easily go the same way. Secondhand game sales are successful now. The stores that offer the service are doing well. Rather than trying to close them, or ignore them, start trying to compete with them before it's too late.
     
  13. DXR_13KE

    DXR_13KE BananaModder

    Joined:
    14 Sep 2005
    Posts:
    9,139
    Likes Received:
    382
    OR they can change the law.
     
  14. TSR2

    TSR2 What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    19 Aug 2009
    Posts:
    160
    Likes Received:
    4
    And the slogan?
    'Would you buy a second hand car?'
     
  15. fatty beef

    fatty beef State Side

    Joined:
    4 Nov 2009
    Posts:
    48
    Likes Received:
    2
    they should make better games that i would not want to sell........ why is someone selling the game would be my question, especially after several weeks.... clearly its not good enough to sit on my shelf
     
  16. mrbens

    mrbens What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    15 Aug 2009
    Posts:
    511
    Likes Received:
    4
    lol good one :D
     
  17. rollo

    rollo Modder

    Joined:
    16 May 2008
    Posts:
    7,887
    Likes Received:
    131
    points at steam think my collection has now grown to like 200 odd games on steam ( sales are us and pressing buy gets you a big collection lol)

    second hand sales are pretty slim tbh i know people who own a second hand shop and they sell 1-2 360 titles a week and 3max of ps3 and thats despite a large collection

    ps2 sales are still at the 100 + unit count a week, Ds games the same and the old xbox still has games that sell well

    problem this generation

    i brought mw2 and have played 200 hrs on it instead of buying a new game, Final fantasy 13 lasted me a good 60-80 hrs on first play through then you redo it.

    boomerang rentals is also pretty much took of since the release of the new consoles and unless its a big title that i want ill rent the game instead of buying i can keep it till i complete it then send it back and get a new game. Its an easy way to save money in the old days of ps2 i used to buy alot of games every month we are talking 5-10 titles some months just seemed alot more choice back then

    Dlc Content has made buying more games kinda pointless when you can update your current software and gain some more time out of it.

    MMOs has also became a much larger part of the gaming circut these days. ( spent nearly 5 years addicted to wow during that time i brought games still they are in a corner still boxed and wrapped some of them whole list of AAA titles im working through on pc. )

    Steam has aion up at the minute for £16 you can buy the entire collection of codemasters works for less than £30 which is the price of a new game instead of 1 i get 17 80=90% of which i have never played. Dirt 2 £10 on pc or £40 on xbox 360 hmm not a hard choice really is it

    they moan about the second hand market ha

    Steam is whats killing them they just too blind to see it nearly everybody owns a pc that can play the latest games these days ( you can get one that can for less than £450 see hardware of the month guides)

    expensive console games vs cheap steam sales for the summer steam wins
     
  18. Altron

    Altron Minimodder

    Joined:
    12 Dec 2002
    Posts:
    3,186
    Likes Received:
    61

    That's what's nice about expansion packs and constant updates. They add value to the game. I think I paid some $100 total for Warcraft 3 - $70 for the Reign of Chaos "Collector's Edition" on launch day, and $30 or so for The Frozen Throne xpac when it came out a couple years ago. I would estimate well into the thousands of hours on Warcraft 3 for me. I've had it for almost a decade, and played it on a regular basis for aa good portion if it. I've played through a hundred versions of DotA. I can imagine that Blizzard doesn't give half a flying **** about second-hand sales, because they churn out games that have huge replayability. I pre-ordered SC2 for $60. It's the first time I've spent more than $20 on a game in YEARs. That's because I know that I will get a huge amount of fun out of that game, for years, like I did from WC2BNE, SC, and WC3. Granted, a big part of that is for custom maps, but those exist in a large part due to Blizzard including a powerful map editor in the game, and blizzard including an expansion pack with a huge variety of gameplay elements to base custom maps around, and continuing to offer free online multiplayer.

    If publishers make games like that, games that you will still be playing a decade after you purchased them, they don't worry about you selling them, because you won't.
    But the publishers who come out with generic, run-of-the-mill games with pretty graphics and sufficient singleplayer to keep you entertained for 10 hours before you completely lose interest in it, then they should expect you to sell it as soon as you beat it.

    Part of what makes TF2 still one of the most popular FPS games over three years after its launch is that Valve is constantly adding new free content, in the form of class updates, hats, weapons, etc. They retain the gameplay that makes it great, but add variety so it keeps it fresh and interesting.

    That's the way to do it - free additional content and expansion packs. They can extend the life of the game for years. They show a vendor is truly committed to keeping the game fun, and they give you no reason to consider reselling the game. The vendors who want to make a quick buck by releasing the game and not adding anything to it after release are the ones getting burned by secondhand sales. Make something worth keeping for more than 2 months, and your problem is solved.
     
  19. shanky887614

    shanky887614 What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    13 May 2009
    Posts:
    203
    Likes Received:
    0
    its impossible to compare the last generation consoels with the new

    i remember when the games fist came out for the ps2 they were usually £20 £30 max and they ususally droped below that in a few weeks

    the reason people arnt buying as many now is a majority of them are rubish casue they only stock well nown developer titles in shops now most people dont realise about the hundreds of game's developed that they dont hear about unless they regually scan sites like gamespot


    how can you buy games that you dont know exisit, a sad fact is most people still dont know how to use the intenret efectivly and when you say to serach for it they ask how

    common snece people; http://www.google.co.uk,http://www.bing.co.uk, http://www.ask.co.uk or www.yahoo.co.uk

    honestly some people need training to use the internet
     
  20. Elton

    Elton Officially a Whisky Nerd

    Joined:
    23 Jan 2009
    Posts:
    8,577
    Likes Received:
    196
    That would cost more money, the 2nd hand sales argument is moot anyhow, but lengthening the game for free would probably encourage sales, however not enough to re-coup.

    It isn't really pricing or anything, more of just that there's too damn many games coming out and half of them are mediocre. I do buy new games, albeit when they become dirt cheap, but I never re-sell them. If the 2nd hand market was so bad, then ATi, Nvidia, Intel and almost everything other manufacturer in the world should complain even more.
     
Tags: Add Tags

Share This Page