yeah cliffy you cant buy another lambo since i bought a used copy of gears.

Cliff Bleszinski has always been a douchebag, so nothing new here. I agree with everything Jim said, companies are blaming used games because they don't want to get the blame themselves. Better management is what companies need, also marketing is getting out of control, I bet that the reason some games fail is not because of meeting development budget, but meeting everything they spend on marketing.

I do wonder if more developers think the same way Cliff does, if the majority think the same, then the gaming industry has some serious problems (more than they have now).

tagging for later.

I've long been arguing that "the middle" of gaming is falling out and no-one seems to care, so I wholeheartedly agree with this article. Which is the second Jim Sterling-related thing I've agreed with in recent memory (alongside a Jimquisition).

I appreciate high production values and effort going into a game. But not every title needs to be like that. And at the other end of the scale, titles which aren't AAA don't need to be indie. There's a middle ground of "in-between" stuff that we need to preserve.

If Compile Heart, someone I should never have to bring into a discussion, can make a JRPG of moderate production values which can more than break even at ~100k physical copies sold plus whatever royalties are paid for licencing it to XSeed or similar; while a third person shooter needs 5 million sales to be a viable investment, then there's something fundamentally wrong with the second option.

Games don't have to be everything. You don't have to be open world, shooter, action with light platforming and puzzle elements. Lots of games should be encouraged to do this, and they should be carefully crafted with big investments to be the best games they can be. But equally, there should be a place in gaming for titles doing only one of those things. Look at EDF, it just focuses on shooting and nothing else and just makes it really, really fun.

I think having a separate price point for titles which aren't AAA but aren't indie would help, too. £25 or so, then build your expectations around selling at that price point, would be good.

That is a very good point. I actually never saw it like that. I got to say that I didn't think that the selling of used game was bad for developer. But with the point you made I got to rethink my position.

Before I though the renting and selling of used game doesn't really take that much money away from developer because most of gamers I know only buy game we are actually interested in and rent other games to see if they are worth purchasing. Then if worthed I buy the game. But most of my friends by them used after confirming they want it through renting. So yes the developers are losing money with my friends.

So what they need to do is developer and publishers putting themselfs together to find a compromise so that both of them make money out of the used game system.

The 6M copy example was for Resident Evil 6 I believe. He probably used Tomb Raider because it took years to complete and if I am not mistaken also had delays because they wanted to continually add more polish to the title.

Also, developers do not need to keep making new engines for each game they produce. This is why he used the Source Engine and the CoD Engine as examples. Creating new engines is very expensive and majority of the time is not needed. Naughty Dog sticking with their engine for next gen alone will significantly reduce costs.

His point was that there are plenty of examples of very high quality titles that do not have exorbitant budgets of $60-$100M and experience profits on sales of 1-2M. His point is that devs and more importantly the publishers refuse to aknowledge that they themselves are contributing to their own issues and instead blaming and wanting to punish the consumer. If you're making a new IP and are not sure of how it will sell, don't spend $60M on it and then huff and puff because 6M people didn't buy it. They should be figuring out how to correct the mistakes they are making on their end and finding ways to reduce costs instead of trying to find new ways to get the consumers to fund those mistakes.

Your example of a person buying a game and selling it 24 hours later is irrelevant. Once a person buys a game they can do whatever they want with it since it is theirs. They own it. If I bought TLoU today and wanted to sell it tomorrow, I shouldn't be punished for doing so, nor does Naughty Dog deserve any of that money from my sale. My copy, my sale, my money. They already got their money from me and in addition gained an additional potential fan and buyer for their next TLoU title.

Don't want us to sell your games? Make it so we don't want to. This is something that not only I believe in, but Nintendo does, Rockstar does and I am positive you could find many others.

It is their job to please the customer. Not the other way around, and if they make a judgement call to put $100M towards their new title and their judgement call ends up falling way short, then that is nobodies fault but their own.

Well, some people surely are, and publishers seem to be focused on satisfying those people. Interminable threads debating the graphical potential of this or that console, sacrificing smooth motion for more detailed screenshots, bullshots, digital foundry... How many times have you seen somebody say that they were interested in Xenoblade but couldn't look past the graphics to actually play it?

They may be a vocal minority, but they're a vocal minority that validates the preconceptions of a lot of people who work in game publishing and development.

The problem is that the discounted and used AAA titles are plugging that middle. The very fact that a game enters retail at a lower price point devalues it in the eyes of many customers, and even if they don't have 60$ to spend, they see a similarly cheap only slightly older and discounted/used AAA title as a better value. Sad, very sad, but true.

It is a very opinionated piece with a biased way of looking at it.  No i dont mean biased as in Microsoft of SOny biased, but a very directed approach at things without looking at the whole picture just to prove a point.  Something I see on this site way too often.  Right now most people are viewing things in there own eyes and that is it.  They dont take into consideration what the developers/publishers go through, so ok sure use your two examples of Nintendo/Rockstar.  Let's just ignore every other developer out there that has to struggle and aren't lucky enough to hav GTA or Mario under there belts.  So games like The Witcher and Heavy Rain has to have just as many used copies sold as new copies yet there games are just as good as Mario and GTA by many people's opinions.

And yeah you can take The Last of Us back tm, which is the problem.  This does not happen in any other industry.  This would not be an issue if they were being sold months from the release date but the fact is brand new games are being sold used within the first week.

Now I would prefer not to comment on this subject anymore as I guarantee you that the majority of the people who reads this will not change there minds about things because they have already set there mind to believe in one thing. So if you want to talk to me about this then pm me.

Somehow I have the fealing people are mistaking expectaions with the break even point. A Videogame publisher has to project the expectations for every released game, so they can invest in future project and cover development and general costs

Tomb Raider and Hitman where profitable games. The problem is Square needed those games to cover a big part of their costs immideatly, while games like FF15 are in development forever. And this takes Ressources. This is mismanagment.

I mean Deus Ex sold less then Tomb Raider in a longer time period and was still considered a success. I mean thats a direct comparison within the same company. Infamous, Killzone, Alan Wake etc. are just other examples. And those are all very good games with state of the art tech.

It all comes down to managment.