Intrinsic on 15 August 2014
Personally, I think this is a really easy problem to fix. Its just that to do it will require every publisher to be on the same page cause resistance from publishers that don't agree can nip the whole process in the bud.
- Games cost $60. For a game at $60 you are no longer in impulse buy mass market territory. This is just a simple fact that needs to be accepted. If you are asking people to pay that much for a game, then you have to spend more convincing them that they should. So this would mean that either only well established IPs will sell well or you spend a small fortune on marketing. Cheaper sells more. A breakdown of that $60 game has ~$25 split between the platfrom holder and the retailer and ~$35 going to the publisher.
Don't really care how they arrive at who gets less, but that number needs to come down. $50 will be a step in the right direction and $40 will be perfect. Personally, I think ideally it should be $60/$50 for physical copies and $50/$40 for digital. Basically digital should be $10 less than whatever physical is. - If they can accomplish (1) then overall sales of games can go up by about 15% at least. As funny as it may seem, its easier geting people to spend $100 for 2 things than $60 for one. Basic economics.
- The need to really consider tiered availability. Don't make it something that one store or the other just randomly does, make it a standard. This is saying, A game will only ever have an asking price of $50 for its first 3-6 months on the market (tier 1). After that (and usually when majority of its sales has been made), its price must drop to at least drop to $25-$30 (tier 2). There are gamers that wil always wait for tier 2 availability since they know its going to come. And then lastly, Tier 3 which will have the game further drop to around $15 to own or $8 to rent for a month.
- They need to do something about used game sales, and rather than try DRM, they simply need to just give new game purchase incentives. Like reward points (RP). So say you buy a tier one game, you get 5RP (which translates to $5). Tier 2 you get 2RP ($2) and tier 3 you get nothing. A better way to do this is to offer partionalize the RPs you get from a game. So say you buy a new game, you get only half its valued RP. Then when you get around 60% of the trophies in the game you get the other half. This will help keep the games in the hands of people longer and will all encourage people to buy new. These RPs can be used on the platforms respective stores to purchase anything. Its kinda like saying if you buy 10 games you get one free.
- And lastly (also most imporatntly), albeit a little controversial, they should also sell RP points as a stand alone that can be used in multiplayer games. Since you can only ever use RP on the digital stores they have no monetary value outside the platforms ecosystem. So in addition to getting RPs they should allow gamers buy RP points that they could either gift to other gamers or use in certain MP modes. Imagine playing a game like tekken or SF. You can create a lobby that has a 5RP winner takes all contestants only buy in. 3 losses and you are eliminated, last man standing takes everything or its split between the last 2 60-40. This will completely change "competitive multiplayer".
Gamers will start spending more buying those points for their online matches (assuming they intend to compete like that, of course the option will still be there for those that wanna just play normally), and when points are won? what do yu thik they do with them? Buy more games, gift it to their friends...etc.
