GameStop: Publishers can make money on used games through DLC

[loves2splooge]

I'm not saying do away with new IPs completely. But you shouldn't release too many. You need to have the right balance between profitable established IPs and new IPs/risky investments. Games like Dante's Inferno, Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, while considered quality games by many, are a drain on EA's resources. EA spent way more money on those games than they made. This is why EA had to lay off a whole bunch of people. The whole idea is to make your money with your established successful IPs and then use those funds to fund your more risky ventures.

People paid the bigger price for Avatar to get the full experience. But Avatar was this mega popular, mega hyped thing. It's not the Call of Dutys that are losing money for game publishers. It's the less popular games. Joe Gamer is not going to care about online play for oh I don't know Army of Two: The 40th Day enough to buy it brand new. If the game doesn't have online without having to shell out the $60, he's probably going to skip the game completely. I mean it's just Army of Two right? Who cares. That's how average gamers think.

Also at least by buying that game used, they're indirectly influencing the gamers who traded in/sold the games to actually buy more games brand new in the store. Because then they think, "yeah it's $60 but if I trade-it-in, I get $30 credit. Credit I can use to buy another game!" or "I can sell it on ebay for a nice sum and then use that money to fund most of my purchase for another game!" Gamestop and ebay (ebay moreso because the seller gets more of their money back) are indirectly supporting game publishers this way. If you can trade in/sell games for a good penny, you're going to have a lot more incentive to buy games. But with this initiative, second hand prices are gonna drop, trade-in values are gonna drop, which means that hardcore gamers will have less money to fund NEW game purchases!

Gamefly too also supports the industry. Gamefly has to buy the actual games from the publishers and I believe they pay the publishers licensing fees for renting. And honestly the cost of a Gamefly 2 games out subscription for a year is more than what the average gamer spends on new games per year anyway. Sure the Gamefly subscriber plays a lot more games than the average gamer. But the more games you play, the more games that Gamefly has to buy from the publisher to meet demand and the more they have to pay in licensing fees. So that's not necessarily a bad thing (particularly when these rental companies manage to stay afloat financially too in the process! Everybody wins).

Once again, about the whole $54 game thing, do people really pay $54 for used games? Come on. $5 savings ain't shit. Maybe I'm out of the loop because I rarely go to GameStop but I can't imagine that $54 used games would be popular unless they were out of stock for a new game and you were desperate enough to just get the used version available. That is an issue that can be corrected if GameStop ordered more new games to put in stock (thing is, GameStop has every reason in the world to purposely understock on the new games and force their $54 used games on you). Bottom line if GameStop is such a problem fo the game industry, why do they stock their games at GameStop? If GameStop wasn't a net positive contributor to the gaming industry, they wouldn't stock their games at GameStop. They'd stock their games elsewhere.