EA games decides they're not hated enough

[adam_grif]

I only buy games periodically, but I rarely, if ever, return them / trade them in. If I ever bought a totally shit game I would, but I don't buy games unless they got generally positive reviews and I've been following it for a while online. Oh man, I feel so sorry for the idiots who buy shit like Iron Man 2 because they liked the movie and thought that the game must be good too.

[Stark]

I'm not sure what the point of waiting for reviews (ps lol) when you can just return it for no loss. Even a good game can be generally finished in a week. If it's good, return it and buy it cheaper!

[adam_grif]

Uh, reviews for most high profile games come out before the release date. Weeks before in some cases, through magazines and the such (the scores of which get conveniently compiled on meta-sites).

Even a good game can be generally finished in a week. If it's good, return it and buy it cheaper!

I did that with Chaos Theory back in the day, but generally I don't bother. The prices take months to drop to levels where it makes it worthwhile to bother with it. Some games that came out a year ago are still the same 78 that they debuted at for JB or Big W.

It's not the most money efficient, but I'll try to get the best deal I can when I buy it then just shelve it and forget about it.

Also, I fucking hate the AU store price hiking on Steam that I've been seeing since CoD4 did it. MW2 was something ridiculous like 88.50 US at it's launch. Fuck that noise. Good thing I didn't want the game anyway.

[Stark]

Shoulda played it on 360 for free like everyone else?

The worthlessness of reviews makes it even more amusing you only play games if some quality genie tells you it's good. If the cost to find out for yourself (always better than asking some fat internet person) is a bus fare, why not?

[Alphawolf55]

Or like how buying a house instead of building it is stealing from construction workers.

Also, in fairness, you can usually pick up new games at 78 or 88 AUD from JB HiFi straight from launch. Lots of places will pricematch them too, and my local EB will pricematch things from the JB online store.

You can't compare the game market to the housing market in that respect. Houses are made to be profitable on the first sale, the entire cost of the house is effectively paid for once its sold, games require millions of sales just to break even. A single bad selling game can bankrupt a developing team especially if they're trying anything creative.

[Stark]

Are you saying housing downturns never put anyone out of business?

There are piles of smaller games that get minor releases and they few copies bounce around secondary markets and I don't see Koei complaining.

Or anyone, except monolithic AAA publishers.

[Alphawolf55]

Are you saying housing downturns never put anyone out of business?

There are piles of smaller games that get minor releases and they few copies bounce around secondary markets and I don't see Koei complaining.

Or anyone, except monolithic AAA publishers.

Koei doesn't complain because they release the same game 5 times in a row and sell millions each time.

Yeah why would the people with the biggest costs complain the most? I WONDER. Seriously, giant used game markets hurt the industry in the long run and the game companies are correctly trying to erase that market.

[Stark]

So... the secondary market isn't a problem for smaller developers because ....

I'm not following your logic here. Those in least danger complain the most about people exercising their rights... because it 'hurts the market'?

As I said, they don't give a shit so long as people buy the day one DLC; they want profit, not to 'erase the market'. Indeed, since most sales occur in the first month, I'm not seeing this huge industry threat.

It's a shame the law isn't based more around what markets corporations want to erase, really. Then they'd lower their prices, right? RIGHT?

[Alphawolf55]

The secondary industry isn't a problem for companies like Koei, because Koei's games sell millions of copies each and they generally sell the same game each time, but if you look at small-developers that try to make innovative games that last only 10 hours, yeah the secondary market is a huge threat to them. I don't think, you understand video games much. At the end of the day EA, Ubisoft, Activision and Nintendo all of them have to see a profit on each game. When games cost 15 million dollars each you have to sell a shit load of games, and anything that hurts into those sales hurts those games. What ends up happening is companies take less risk and shovel out more sequels.

I don't think you get it, the majority of game sales both new and used both happen in the same first month. Let say for example Mario Galaxy 2 ends up sell 2 million new copies and 1 million used copies. The majority of both of those sales happen in the release month, during the time those games are on the shelves, the price different is 5-10 buck at most, to pretend that the used game market isn't heavily digging into the profitability of games is to ignore reality.

If you don't think that the game companies want to erase the used game markets, you clearly aren't paying attention.

[adam_grif]

Shoulda played it on 360 for free like everyone else?

Huh?

The worthlessness of reviews makes it even more amusing you only play games if some quality genie tells you it's good. If the cost to find out for yourself (always better than asking some fat internet person) is a bus fare, why not?

How exactly are they "worthless"? I'm not trying to construct an accurate metric here, I just need to know if a game is an unplayable turd or not.

Rules of thumb: anything that scores <60% on GR or MC is such a game. 61-70% might be good, but chances aren't great. 71-80 are generally good-but-flawed games. If there's a demo or something I'll try it and see how it goes. 80 and up are the ones I'm after.

Since I started doing this, I haven't ever bought a shitty game. Maybe I missed a few good ones, but I already have enough shit to do with my free time, and the list of games on my "to buy" list is already too large.

[Stark]

Sorry, Metacritic is totally worthless. If you take the average of a group of worthless numbers, the result is not less useless. A bunch of idiots are still idiots.

But then, anyone who breaks down games into 'might be good' and 'good but flawed' like the real world fits into review magazine stereotypes is obviously not a well-considered consumer.

Since you just admitted to buying like three games a year, claiming you never bought a shit one is laughable. The best part? Crap games can still be fun, and since it's free, who cares? UH OH!

Turns out choosing games isn't a science. There's no way I'd have played Metro if I listened to stupid reviews, and since most game reviewers are total fat nerd idiots this shouldn't be surprising.

And yeah, MW2 was worth the zero dollars I payed for it. Not that you'd know, because you're too much of an elitist who bases their elitism on the average of the opinions of idiots.

If you don't think that the game companies want to erase the used game markets, you clearly aren't paying attention.

The contention is if this is due to any benefit to the industry, or simply because they want to make money. You repeating yourself is not an argument. Corporations exist to make money so OF COURSE they're going to try to limit a consumer's options; that's what cartels are all about!

[adam_grif]

Sorry, Metacritic is totally worthless.

Ballocks. It gives you a neat summary of the critical response, as well as user-ratings, and importantly, links to the actual reviews themselves so you can read and find out why they felt it was good or bad. From here I'll watch the GT video review to see the game in action, and if I'm still undecided, I'll watch the IGN and GS ones as well.

Blah blah subjective blah blah numbers are useless blah blah. I don't really care what you think about the utility of reviews.

Since you just admitted to buying like three games a year, claiming you never bought a shit one is laughable.

Closer to five ones at the 80-100 dollar mark, but I like to pick up games on the cheap from Steam (i.e. Bioshock for 5 bucks), which brings up the total games per year to more like 15.

And I have to retract my statement! I did buy a shit game once! DoW: Soulstorm. But in my defense, it came with a bundle I got on Steam, and I bought it because I wanted the other DoW games, not ShitStorm.

Turns out choosing games isn't a science.

No shit, nor do I claim it is. But these heuristics work well enough.

[SAMAS]

Here the used games retailers want to squeeze every penny out of a used copy, they make it trivially cheaper than a new copy because they know that the difference will be enough to tempt someone, and that means more profit for them.

Yeah, same in Australia.

NEW = 119.95
USED = 114.95

FUCKING BARGAIN.

Don't go spending that five dollars all at once.

Depending on where you are, that can be the difference between a game and a game and a pizza to enjoy while playing it.

More importantly, that used price goes down over time. This is especially good in the case of older games for that system (or the previous generation) that you may have missed when they first came out. Games that you may not be able to find in a normal retail store at all.

Don't get me wrong, I try to buy games new whenever I can. But sometimes, I can't. I can't get Onimusha 3 at Best Buy or Wal-Mart or anywhere but Gamestop, where I can get it for like nine bucks. Even in the case of games that are still in circulation, that extra five dollars may be the difference between within budget and outside.

[Alphawolf55]

The contention is if this is due to any benefit to the industry, or simply because they want to make money. You repeating yourself is not an argument. Corporations exist to make money so OF COURSE they're going to try to limit a consumer's options; that's what cartels are all about!

And you haven't actually made a point other then "USED GAMES DON'T HURT THE INDUSTRY" and my point is, yes they do. They limit the profitability of games which makes it so that developers end up having to either raise the cost of games, lower the amount they spend on games and thus lower the quality, or only make games with low risk.

You also say there's no way game companies would lower prices and while it's not likely they will due to such rising development cost, history shows there's a chance they would. Are game companies corporations? Yes, do they like profit? Yes but if you look game companies have been pretty fair about price, in the last 26 years of gaming, prices have actually been steadily dropping except for the sudden rise for Xbox 360 and PS3 games. In the cartidge days games were generally 60-90 dollars, what happened when they moved to CDs? They lowered the price, even though game development cost was rising and inflation would've justified keeping the same price tag or even raising it. Inflation has raised the cost of everything, game development cost have raised far faster then inflation, yet games are relatively the cheapest they've ever been.

[General Zod]

And you haven't actually made a point other then "USED GAMES DON'T HURT THE INDUSTRY" and my point is, yes they do. They limit the profitability of games which makes it so that developers end up having to either raise the cost of games, lower the amount they spend on games and thus lower the quality, or only make games with low risk.

That's completely blinkered logic. What makes you think the people who buy used would buy new if there were no used option instead of doing without? I know there's any number of games I've held off on buying because they were too expensive and there was no demo or cheaper used alternative.

[Alphawolf55]

A good number of used game sales occur during the first month of release of said game when the difference between new and used is 5-10 dollars. To suggest that none of those people would buy the game new without the used option is ridiculous.

[General Zod]

A good number of used game sales occur during the first month of release of said game when the difference between new and used is 5-10 dollars.

Which is why people wait until it drops to a reasonable amount. Waiting 6 months or more to pick up a title because of the price isn't unheard of. I mean this isn't rocket science here, if there's a lot of used copies of a game within its first few weeks, that's generally a good sign that it's most likely a shitty game. So far you haven't done a very good job of showing how used games actually cause harm aside from using the same mealy-mouthed backwards logic the media industry uses against piracy.

To suggest that none of those people would buy the game new without the used option is ridiculous.

It's a good thing that's not what I'm suggesting then.

[Alphawolf55]

How does your argument make any sense. I point out that a-lot of people buy used games even when the difference is price is minimal, so minimal that if the used game wasn't around they would probably buy it new. You then argue that people would just wait till it's more reasonably priced (two separate scenarios) but lets pretend that's true. Lets pretend that unless the game developer lowered the game price by 5-10 dollars, those people won't buy it. Okay, so they do lower it and people buy it new but at a lower price. The game developers still make a profit just a lower one, but with used game sales the developers make NO profit.

Seriously how is it hard to understand that the used game market is basically rotating games in and out of stores like Gamestop, with the original developer receiving no extra money outside the initial purchase and how that harms game companies. In a scenario where 10 different people paid to play Assassin Creed but Ubisoft only received the money for one game sale, how can you argue that the game companies aren't losing out? These are people who have proven they are willing to pay to play games yet you're somehow arguing that without used games they wouldn't buy them otherwise when that's just stupid.

Comparing game piracy to the second hand market is comparing apples and oranges. One is a group that pays nothing and thus you can't expect that in a market without piracy they would've bought the game, but with the second hand market you know for a fact they're willing to pay for games, you might have to lower your prices to get them but selling a game at a lower price new is still better then Gamestop selling it for the same price old.

[Dooey Jo]

And you haven't actually made a point other then "USED GAMES DON'T HURT THE INDUSTRY" and my point is, yes they do. They limit the profitability of games which makes it so that developers end up having to either raise the cost of games, lower the amount they spend on games and thus lower the quality, or only make games with low risk.

Isn't that what they said about the VCR?

It's all about already huge companies being greedy fucks and seeing that more people are playing their games than bought a new copy, and believing that if they removed the possibility of getting the used games at a cheaper price, those extra people would still buy and play the game. There is a good possibility many or most would in fact not. There is nothing stopping the publishers themselves from inventing their own "used games" model if they wanted in on that market, if only they didn't want to suck as much money as absolutely possible out of people, instead preferring to prevent perfectly reasonable things like people selling stuff they legitimately own.

And what would a reasonable consumer say after she bought a used game, turned it on, and got a screen say "o hai pay $20 more to play this game"? She'd vow to never buy any games from that shit developer again. But for some reason "gamers" are a strange type of consumer that gladly takes it up the ass, and then maybe goes on the internet to complain about the lack of lubricant.

[Vendetta]

Ballocks. It gives you a neat summary of the critical response, as well as user-ratings, and importantly, links to the actual reviews themselves so you can read and find out why they felt it was good or bad. From here I'll watch the GT video review to see the game in action, and if I'm still undecided, I'll watch the IGN and GS ones as well.

The trouble is, most videogame reviews are written by, well, videogame journalists. Who are by and large either complete pillocks or shackled to the editorial position of their rag (and bound to fellate it's advertisers).

There's also a distinct lack of critical faculty among games journos, they don't really look at and rate core gameplay features, but try and shoehorn their review into the preset areas that all their reviews have to contain because it makes it easier for them to churn out seven or eight pieces a week.

[Alphawolf55]

Interesting Fact.

The Original Super Mario Bros would be $96.54 in today's cash. Donkey Kong Country would be 97.59, OOT would be 91 dollars. Metal Gear Solid would be 65 dollars.

[General Zod]

Seriously how is it hard to understand that the used game market is basically rotating games in and out of stores like Gamestop, with the original developer receiving no extra money outside the initial purchase and how that harms game companies. In a scenario where 10 different people paid to play Assassin Creed but Ubisoft only received the money for one game sale, how can you argue that the game companies aren't losing out? These are people who have proven they are willing to pay to play games yet you're somehow arguing that without used games they wouldn't buy them otherwise when that's just stupid.

There's at least one game publisher that disagrees with you. How many new purchases do you think are due to people trading in old copies of games they're finished with?

http://wii.ign.com/articles/102/1023199p1.html

IGN: A big part of your business is the used game market. But a lot of people in the industry can be hostile towards used games. What's your rebuttal/defense?

Mondhaschen:It's sort of a mixed bag in terms of the feedback that we get from publishers and from a lot of the friends that we have personally in the development community. I'd say "hostile" is probably an overstatement. At the outside they're probably curious, and on the inside they're a little bit defensive. Generally speaking, the way that we view the used games business as participating in the channel is, like any other economic dynamic, your secondary market always serves to fuel the primary market. And the way that it does that is it provides incremental liquidity to people who want to buy into the primary market.

IGN: Whoa, our eyes just glazed over.

Mondhaschen: People tend to focus on how used games do or don't take away from sales on the new side of the house. And what they neglect to look at is the way that we get used games is by trading games. We did a study not too long ago for a very large vendor who we managed to figure out for them 20 percent of their sales inside the first 28 days were paid for with trade dollars. So you got 20 points of their sales that wouldn't happen unless we had a trade business going. And that's specialty retail. Game specialty retail is maybe a third of the channel, 35 percent of the channel. So you got 10 percent of your sales that wouldn't happen unless somebody was out there trading games with your customers.

And if you didn't have specialty retail it would be pretty hard to sell innovation into the channel at all. I mean, Wal-Mart doesn't really buy Katamari Damacy. So, in order to innovate, in order to grow innovation in the business you need a specialty games retailer that actually knows something about videogames. And in order to have them, they need the margins through used games. But then the loopback, the way publishers get cut in is through trades. Because trades go to purchase new games.

IGN: Do publishers see any money from used game sales?

Mondhaschen:Typically no. There are ways that they can through the rental business. But typically they don't directly. Most of their cutback is through the sympathetic business that they get out of DLC. So, as an example, when The Lost and Damned (L&D) came out we started selling a whole lot more Grand Theft Auto 4, both on the new side and on the used side. Which, then, sort of funds people's ability to go play L&D again. And then the trade business funded all those L&D cards that showed up in stores.

IGN: So, as a specialty store, your direct competitor must be GameStop.

Mondhaschen: I've heard of them.

IGN: Why should gamers shop at Game Crazy as opposed to GameStop?

Mondhaschen: One, our pricing: especially on the used/trade side of the house, we've got a more-for-trades guarantee that we're very proud of and we uphold it, day on day. We'll absolutely give you more for your trades, writ large. We let people play games in-store, and it's not what's on the reel it's basically "what you want to play, you can play in the store." From a customer service perspective I know that we have a lot more initiative in terms of driving quality of customer service into our store than they do. And I know that because we employ a lot of people that used to work for them and were frustrated with their quality of customer service. We're located next to Hollywood Video stores, which means that we also then offer a rental games business next door. Which is a little bit more full-service than I think GameStop is ready to offer. And beyond that, being next to a Hollywood Video store basically gives us the ability to, frankly, touch mass market consumers a whole lot more often; talk to mass market consumers a whole lot more often. So, we're a little bit more familiar with and a little bit more exposed to talking to people who don't play games very often, who buy games for other people, who play games casually... and we don't get scared of that. That's something that I've seen other mass market retailers struggle with a whole lot. You know, talking to an audience that doesn't fall asleep with their headset on.

[Alphawolf55]

Maybe it's the fact that I'm running off 3 hours of sleep, but which game publisher is that? Your article links to a manager of retail and used games. You're expecting him to be unbias?

[General Zod]

Maybe it's the fact that I'm running off 3 hours of sleep, but which game publisher is that? Your article links to a manager of retail and used games. You're expecting him to be unbias?

We did a study not too long ago for a very large vendor who we managed to figure out for them 20 percent of their sales inside the first 28 days were paid for with trade dollars. So you got 20 points of their sales that wouldn't happen unless we had a trade business going.

How the fuck can you get any bias out of this? I admit I made a mistake and assumed they were interviewing a publisher and not a game store manager, but that doesn't really have any bearing on the point. 20% of new game sales from trade-in credit alone is a lot, and it's an actual number. So far the amount of actual numbers you've provided is. . .zero.

[Sharp-kun]

Would the whole first sale concept even apply? Last time I actually bothered to read a EULA for software, I'm fairly certain they made it (or at least tried to) rather clear that you do not own the product, you merely have purchased a license to use thier product. .

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole EULA thing for software shakey as it is, given you only get shown it after you've bought the product and are installing it and I expect most retailers would laugh you out of the store if you tried to return a game as you didn't agree to it.