Used Games Debate - Gamestop vs. Publishers

[heruamon]

@twesterm

I'm kinda seeing your point, but when I say “greed”, it implies that publishers and developers are trying to milk this whole “recouping cost” line of reasoning, used to justify higher game prices. The fact is that most developers now have 360/PS3 programming on auto-pilot, and I’d challenge ANY of them to DOCUMENT the development cost of a game, these many years out from the launch of these consoles. When you’ve got, Joe blow developing simple games for these console in their basement with the development kits out, it’s a joke. Sure, these simply games are no Gears 2 or R2, but here’s the thing about it; neither game design finding the cure for cancer or solving world hunger. If software development costs haven’t been drastically reduced from original launch titles, they are doing something wrong, and what does that say about the next gen of games…are we going to be paying $70 to $80 for a title? I’m not going to pay that…I’ll be a PC gamer from then on. These guys remind me of the oil companies…and the pharmaceuticals with this nonsense…while banking major profits.
Epic is one of the developers b!tching like crazy, but let’s REALLY look at Gear to Gear 2…is there anything REALLY radical there??? Is there 60-80 million difference between the 2 games….I think not…I love the game so far, and the expanded features are VERY nice, but they need to spare us with the nonsense about them going broke, and losing profits. The fact is this…the way you make people KEEP their titles longer is to have meaningful DLC…6-8 months AFTER the game is launched, and I don’t mean horse armor. I loved Mass Effect, but the DLC sucked in the implementation. I’m interested to see how good this DLC is going to be for GTA4.
To cap my rant off, look at the Wonderful World of Warcraft…sure there seems to be lots of hate from certain people, but how the heck is it that WoW user base KEEPS growing…in the face of mad amounts of competition from others…DLC and Expansions that keeps us coming back for more. After TBC, I took periods off from WoW, but I always knew that I need to come back ever now and then to do other stuff. I certainly don’t think console developers can make games that’ll keep players for years, but if you can input enough DLC to keep them for 6-8 months owning the game, you’re freaking golden…and if the title is good. I go back to Mass Effect…the game started off slow in sales, but it’s base grew and grew and here we are a year later, and we’ve gotten 1 crappy DLC…that requires you to have made sure you hadn’t already FINISHED the game…that’s piss poor for a great game.