| binary solo said: Sure developers are missing out on some revenue, but not nearly what Mr Blitz Games says. But Movie studios are missing out on revenue from used DVD sales, and Music publishers are missing out on revenue from used CD sales, Book publishers are missing out on revenue from used book sellers, none of them are crying about it. What's so special about games? Game developers and publishers should get over themselves and stop being so precious about the used game market. It's legal, it's legit, and morally speaking undermining peoples' rights to sell their possessions is fundamentally worse diminishing a company's ability to make a profit. |
People in an industry which have business models that don't generate sufficient profits, end up complaining about the nature of the market. The videogame industry has set itself on a path to try to be like the movie industry, WITHOUT there being an outlet like theaters, which allow them to recover their production costs. They are doing this, while also seeing costs to make a AAA going up, because not only do they have to be concerned about shooting a movie, but also adding gameplay, and they have products with very little replayability to them (story driven games). The end result is that they are on razor-thin margins, because they believe that the world has to go along with their schemes on how to make a game, and pay for it. And they complain over and over. First, it was piracy. Now that piracy isn't an issue for consoles, they complain about used game market. Stop that, they will then target game rentals. Because the produce disposable products with production costs that are getting larger than films, without the added revenue of box office, they are at a place where they do this whining.
I will add here that, while I take issue with the whining about used game sales, I do NOT have issue with the industry offering free DLC for people who buy new, or work on other things to encourage buying new in a positive way. I also believe it is a good idea to keep providing more content for people to download, that they can pay for (see Borderlands), as the price of the product drops on the shelves. A perfect feature here would be that the people who bought and pre-ordered the game first, get all the content during the life for free. As the price of the game drops, and more used shows up, that content is paid for by those who buy it used. What the industry needs to do is figure out how to keep products out of the used area for as long as possible. Add value, don't whine and pressure and bully.
