Second hand trade hurts developers as much as software piracy...

[NJ5]

Bodhesatva said:

numonex said:

EB Games/Game Stop and many other game stores make most of their profits from their shonky second hand trades.

Game developers and publishers receive no money from the second hand game trade.

Second hand game trades hurts developers as

 much as software piracy. In both cases developers and publishers receive no money from the second hand games sale or downloaded game.

Game stores not only rip off consumers with terrible pricing in their favour, they rip the game industry off as a whole. Renting and lending games to a smaller extent hurt the game developers and publishers. Fewer customers purchase the games by second hand purchase, pirate game, rental or borrowing a game from a friend.

Bear in mind the cost of developing video games these days is sky rocketing, costing as much as $100 million for some game developments.

End of rant/

Okay, let's examine this with a larger lense.

The automobile industry also has a second hand market, and despite several companies having enormous issues recently (GM, Chrysler), no one is blaming the existance of a second hand market. Almost everyone agrees that these companies' problems are caused by their own poor choices and failed business initiatives.

That not good enough for you? Okay, how about the movie industry, which has a vibrant used DVD market? How about books, or music, or jewelry, or guns, or electronics? How about second hand clothes? Used houses? All of these industries have second hand markets, and none of them are crying about it. It's the nature of any industry.

The actual problem is the one you've already highlighted -- game development budgets have "skyrockted, costing as much as $100 million for some game developments."

The problem is, everybody seems to like spending all that money. They want to make big, expensive productions, and now that they've started doing it, they certainly don't want to go backwards. So instead of doing that, they're looking for a scape goat, and they've settled on used games. Despite the fact that it's a market which exists in virtually every other comparable industry, with little or no complaint.

It's like going 200 MPH in your car and then, when your engine rapidly breaks down, you complain that it was built poorly by the designers. In reality, your engine is no different than anyone else's: you're just a fool for driving so fast.

I'm not completely dismissing your point (your point about development costs is valid), but let's look at each of the examples you gave seperately:

Cars/clothes/electronics: they deteriorate with use, much more so than games, which makes new items much more valuable than used ones when compared to games

Books: they also degrade with use more than games, they're much cheaper to make than games (I mean in terms of fixed costs, not the ongoing costs of producing copies)

Music: as with books, recording an album is also much cheaper than making a game, and CDs tend to sell for a long time, which makes them less risky than developing games for music publishers. For the actual artists, they're not the main source of income, concerts are.

DVD: This is the best example you gave, but DVDs are not the main source of profit for movie studios as far as I know, whereas game sales are almost the only source of revenue a game publisher has. Their life would probably be easier if there was something analogous to cinemas for games.

Houses: The fixed costs here are ZERO, a home builder only spends money on materials and labor to build a new home. This is the diammetrical opposite of games, which are expensive to develop and cheap to make a copy of. Bad analogy.

Jewelry: same as houses.