Today’s Penny Arcade strip and accompanying news article kicked off quite the online discussion. The topic was one that I had not realized was so controversial: should gamers support the second hand video games market?
Tycho laid out his position with the scathing eloquence that he has become famous for:
In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of [the game's publisher]. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can’t figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.
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I traded in games for a long time, there’s probably comics somewhere in the archive about it – you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things. It was sort of like Free Money, and we should have understood from the outset that no such thing exists. You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction.
The fallout from this electronic hand grenade was as swift as it was divided, with players coming out of the woodwork to state their opinion, most visibly on Twitter.
Given my penchant for verbosity, my single tweet on the subject didn’t even begin to feel sufficient, however it does sum up the crux of the problem for me: “I’m happy to buy new, but game devs have to realize that not every game – in fact very few – are worth my $60.”
Thrifty gaming
Being a console gamer is not a cheap hobby. There is an up front investment of approximately $350 for a reasonably durable system, and then an incremental cost of between $40 and $60 for regular retail games (which provide between ten and forty hours of game play each if played to their conclusion).
It is because of this expense that I do not – in fact, cannot, if I want to live a balanced life – buy every single title that I am interested in as soon as it is released. Instead I have to bide my time and wait for a price to fall to what I consider an acceptable level before investing in the software. Despite the sleazy practices employed by EBGames/Gamestop, it is often in their pre-owned section that steep drops in price initially occur. New console games hold their full cost for an obnoxious amount of time.
The kicker is that I prefer to buy new. Whenever an EBGames clerk asks me if I’d prefer to save $5 by purchasing a used copy on a game that I’ve already decided meets my price point, I politely decline. In fact, when I purchased a copy of Retro Games Challenge for my Nintendo DS earlier this year, I actually startled the poor shmoe behind the counter by asking if they had a new copy in stock.
Take a hint from the PC market
If the console publishers are truly interested in curbing the massive profits realized by the used video game market, then there are far more effective strategies than trying to cripple used games via pack-in codes. Specifically, the source of the problem – money – must be addressed.
- Lower initial price point. Instead of trying to maximize the money extracted from every buyer, publishers should be trying to maximize the number of buyers. A decades-long trend in the industry has been that, aside from a few megahits, the games that consistently realize the highest revenues are those that are priced around $20. Lowering the financial barrier to entry will drive sales beyond what is currently possible with the $60 game by making video games an impulse purchase to a wider audience.
- Aggressive sales. Not only has Steam saved small development studios, but some analysts have stated that Steam is responsible for saving the entire PC games industry. One of the primary mechanisms that Steam uses to drive purchases is aggressive sales. Valve have become masters at crafting promotions that are specifically designed to send consumers into an impulsive buying spree.
If the console publishers want to reduce the prominence of used video games then it is going to have to take a good hard look at their own sales practices and accept responsibility for driving money-conscious consumers away from their new product. The majority of gamers would love nothing more than to fork over some cash to their favorite developers as a way of thanking them for the hours of entertainment that they provide, but in order to make that happen for a larger percentage of the audience, prices must first come down.
8 Responses to “The second hand stigma”
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Aye, it’s the age old marketing issue of a demand curve. Way too many publishers (note, not developers) are swinging for the fences rather than trying to actually understand their market.
It’s not rocket science. It’s not even high school math.
You’re correct re: developer vs publisher. (Although the line blurs with indies in the PC market…. but I’m discussing consoles)
Absolutely.
Before Steam, I rarely, rarely bought games. Very rarely. I’d been burned enough times by buying crappy games – or rather, decent enough games, but just not worth $60. So, I took to piracy first, as I was unwilling(and very, very often unable) to put so much money on the line. I still bought some games, ones I felt were indeed worth the $60, but a great many publishers/developers lost sales opportunities to me.
I pretty much never bought second hand. It did not benefit the developer, so why bother paying at all? Pirate the game, or buy it second hand at EBGames, it’s all the same to the developer.
I’m not particularly concerned morally: In my opinion (and I know people will differ, but honestly I just don’t care) there is absolutely no harm done in my pirating a game I would not have bought in the first place. They, after all, lose nothing. No harm, no foul.
Steam, however, has changed the gaming world for me. Where once I pirated first, and (rarely, admittedly) bought later, now steam’s rampant sales and low-cost but interesting looking games (and very easy demo downloads) have nearly entirely replaced piracy.
I haven’t pirated a new release in about a year now. It’s just so easy and inexpensive to buy, paying ~$20 for a game is far more reasonable, and it’s so much more convenient – automatic patching, easy reinstallation, support for the fact that I don’t use an optical drive at all so DVD’s are a pain in the ass.
I could care less about the utter removal of second hand game sales via digital distribution. First, the games are inexpensive enough if you wait a month or so that they’re cheaper than they would have been used in the first place. Second, I never sell games I’ve bought – I hold on to them, because I *will* play them again in the future unless they were truly terrible… in which case no one would buy them anyways.
If anything, I *support* the removal of second-hand sales given the Steam-esque low cost-high volume aggressive sales because all sales of the software benefit the developer.
Buying instead of pirating also removes a lot of the concerns over viruses, and other malware I’d assume.
I did my fair share of piracy back in my university days, but just end up not buying titles these days (or, buying used which is apparently akin to stealing according to some publishers/developers).
Ease of ownership is really the big issue here – it’s the same story as DRM: reduce barriers to legitimate purchases and you will realize more sales.
I love how Steam sales tend to increase game sales by hundreds of percent and the companies end up making more money overall. Shouldn’t this clue them in to the fact that their games are priced way too high. I know I always end up grabbing interesting games during Steam’s sales.
Overall, I would buy way more games if the price point was closer to $20 or $30. I think this $60 trend is pretty ridiculous.
To be fair the console market isn’t quite to the point where they have equivalent digital distribution to the PC market. That said, a lot of that is their own doing – Microsoft actively rips its customers off by providing inferior hard drives, and while Sony does a better job they still lag way behind PCs. (Nintendo is still prehistoric.)
But nothing is preventing Sony, MS, and Nintendo from embracing the digital distribution market and utilizing Steam-like tactics. It’s totally in their power to do so.
I’d argue that the success of XBox Live is a step in that direction. I know it’s been good business for my little company (NinjaBee/Wahoo), and the Live scene really has changed even just in the last two years. Initially, it was seen as a sort of second-rate indie playground. These days, it’s Big Business.
All with an average *high end* price tag of $15/game.
[...] Andrew, MBP, PvD, GBN and Syp have good posts on it (with links to other good ones), so I won’t reiterate much… I’ll just point to what I’ve already written about this, almost two years ago. [...]