Why is buying used games such a big deal nowadays?

[Michael-5]

Jay520 said:

Michael-5 said:

Games are also in general selling better then they used to. Before the PS2 era it was unheard of to see a 3rd party game break 10 million units sold, now games like CoD sell 20 million annually.

I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but this post bugs me. 

The big change with this generation is sales required to make a profit. It's a lot higher than it was in the past, where most big games could sell a few hundred-thousand units and make profit. Now we are starting to see studios cancelling IPs or shutting down because of 1m, 2m and even 3m selling games not making enough profit.

Yes, gaming is getting bigger, which means the biggest games today will be bigger than the biggest games of yesterday. However, that's only beneficial for the big AAA games. The small-medium sized games that sell 1-3 million units are important too, and these are the very type of games who are susceptible to little to no profit as a result of rising development costs.

I agree that banning used games is not the ideal solution to the problem of rising costs. Heck, I would even concede that the problem may be solved in the near future with digital distribution, easier development kits, etc. (maybe it will, maybe it won't. I don't know). However, do not say that the problem is solved by a bigger gaming market, since that's not true.

I agree with you, games need to sell more to make a profit, but that's also the problem. Why is it that Platinum Studios can make a profit selling a few hundred thousand copies of Bayonetta, or Atlus can make a profit selling a few hundred thousand copies of Catherine (both excellent games), but THQ goes out of buisness since they can't sell 3 million units of Saints Row?

Some studios just aren't efficient. While Saints Row, and DMC (Ninja Theory) are great games, they needlessly expensive to produce. The people developing the games just aren't as talented as the people behind Vanquish or Tales of ___.

I think banning used games is wrong, in the example of cars, do we ban trading in Cryslers just because reliability is crap and people don't want to hold onto them? No, we let them phase out. Sad to say, THQ, and Ninja Theory should phase out because they can't make great games on a budget.

I'd rather have a game culture where we saw less console games, but they were all excellent, then a culture where are more games, but half of them are only mediocre. The former would increase sales for games which are actually great (since there are less studios and thus less games to compete with), and it would push smaller developers to work on smaller projects, maybe for handheld games, and reduce the size of their company (which would make them more efficient).

It's not nice to say that I'd rather have crap studios disband, but this is the way the world is. If you want your product to sell, you have to make a great game which either has a large market (Just Dance), or make a great game which has low development costs (Vanquish).