| disolitude said: Do consumers win at the end by being free to trade games freely and openly without publishers getting a cut? If you value your content I am not so sure that they do... You may pay more in the long run if you can't trade games but you will get higher quality and more varied content in return. You will also see cheaper games to begin with...having different companies competing for your dollar pretty much guarantees that the prices would go down as their bottom line is improved. |
If there were no used games at all, the polarization would be remarkable. You'd have people paying full price on only a couple of games a year, which would ONLY be blockbusters. Your Halos, CoDs, Uncharteds. Everything below that threshold, and above downloadable titles, would disappear. No one would try anything new. No new IPs, no mid-level games. Most people would simply not be able to take risks. Beyond that, you'd have people playing a LOT fewer games overall, which would possibly lead them away from consoles in general. The player base would fragment and fade away over time.
This could be combated with cheaper prices but the problem is that the industry wants the consumer to bear that burden. Microsoft hinted that if everyone followed along, we MIGHT get cheaper prices eventually. That's backwards. The consumer does not have to put up with the cost if the industry wants to go in another direction. Start with the cheaper prices and then we'll talk.
The real truth of the matter is that the perils of used games could be reduced dramatically overnight. All that would need to be done is to make digital content significantly cheaper than retail. Add "trade-in" credit on digital that matches what GameStop offers for a disc and they could kill used games. However, they won't do that, because they want to keep retail happy. Microsoft's crappy system was all about giving the big boys like GameStop a cut while completely destroying the little guys, such as the trading sites I like to use. It wasn't about the developer, it was about controling the market.
Used games can be done away with naturally just by making digital a better value, which it SHOULD be, anyway. When they're ready to do that, then we'll know they're actually serious about giving funds back to the developers.
