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Forums - Gaming - Gamestop to overhaul trade-ins, average base value to increase 20%

g911turbo on 05 August 2014
Intrinsic said:
Am I the only one that feels sony and MS are heavily dropping the ball on game pricing which makes nonsense like this even necessary?

If I were sony/ms;
I would drop the price of every digitally released game that sold over 1 million copies by 50% (to $30) after 6 months on the market. We all know that majority of a games sales happens in its first 30-60 days.

3 months after that (9 months after release) I would drop the price to $20 to own the game, and provide an option to rent the game for 30 days at $10.

I will also give new game reward points (RP) for every new game purchase. So say you buy a new game you get 5RP. The RP has equivalent monetary value and can be used at anytime. If you rack up enough RP you can use it and buy any number of games/dlc. This will in effect reward those that buy games between the first 6 months at full price and keep them buying from the network.

Why this is so hard to do is beyond me. Yet they complain about used game sales. Give people better prices and faster bigger discounts and they would buy from you instead of resorting to the used bin.

Either that, or provide a market place to buy and sell digital licenses of your games.  They could charge a fee (like ebay would) to sell the game.  A fee that would then go back to the dev and MS/Sony...

 

Same end goal of giving people some options.

 

Problem is, they (mainly MS at the beginning of the gen before the 180) want it all and they want it now.



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The Fury on 05 August 2014
Landguy said:

I agree, the digital versions of games SHOULD be atleast 20% less expensive than their retail version.  That day may come, but not until retail dumps game sales altogether.  To get retail to keep the games on the shelves, there can't be such a major difference in the prices between the two.  The bad part is, that when this happens, they won't bother to pass on the discount to us end users, as we will be used to the prices by then.  Also, PSN/XBL type interfaces will just absorb the retail profits.

Just an added thought to the Music sales link.  The comparison is kind of iffy, as they are talking about WHOLE album sales.  Most music isn't purchased in whole albums anymore.  Even in the article, they state that digital sales exceed hard copy sales in 2011.  Even knowing that, I am a little surprised that album sales are still chugging along on CD.  I just thought back to the last few full albums that me or my wife purchased and 4 of the 6 were on CD.  Of course, that took 2 years or so to accomplish.  Just this year, both of my cars are now bluetooth(used to be just mine) capable.  So, my wife now agrees that she will buy music digital only.  It will take a while longer, but the reason to even have a cd player is going away.  Just like a number of people that I know that don't even have a DVD/Bluray player anymore.  As things break or whatever, people might not even replace them.

They need to lower costs now, added competition as well on their console directly if they want digital sales (and therefore DRM) to succeed, as saind before as an example, Titanfall for Xbone is still £55 on their digital store. Get it in a shop on a disc for just £25 (or less used). 

I can understand that, I doubt single sales are anything like album sales but gaming doesn't have the equivilent comparision directly. Three isn't an option to buy a game in 15 small parts. :P Gaming is lagging behind in digital sales compared to music, but I'd presume DVDs/Blu-Rays are worse other than services like Netflix, there is not real way of buying a digital copy of a movie only and keeping it (you usually by a DVD/Blu-Ray and it comes with a digital version as well, so much better value for money). CD's people buy them and then just copy the music, DRM free, yet the music industry still complains about piracy from their mansions. :P



Hmm, pie.

The Fury on 05 August 2014
Neodegenerate said:

The revenue numbers you have here indicate that 13.3% (or so) of Gamestops revenue is in used games.  So that 500k new example in your first paragraph would have around 66k used sales, not 5k.  Furthermore, the profit on the used game sales is significantly higher than the profit on the new game sales since the developers see 0% of the used game sales.

 

I agree completely with this point.  Pricing on digital is perceived very poorly (hell, one guy is calling for 20% less in another post) and needs some form of adjustment.  I personally have been buying a lot more from the PS store when I see a great sale digitally, hoping that the trend continues: more sales.

 

Sorry, I wasn't as clear as i should have been. Yes, it is 13% of Gamestop's revenue but it's only Gamestop. I know more about the UK so as an example, GAME are one of only 3 major high street stores that do used games but they are the only one in the top 5 retailers to who sell games. All the supermarkets rank higher (from what I undertand) in game sales than CEX (used only) or Grainger Games (new and used) and they don't do used at all. Just a guess on now many % used games are compared to their new sales figures.

More sales are good, competition would be better.



Hmm, pie.

Neodegenerate on 05 August 2014
The Fury said:

Sorry, I wasn't as clear as i should have been. Yes, it is 13% of Gamestop's revenue but it's only Gamestop. I know more about the UK so as an example, GAME are one of only 3 major high street stores that do used games but they are the only one in the top 5 retailers to who sell games. All the supermarkets rank higher (from what I undertand) in game sales than CEX (used only) or Grainger Games (new and used) and they don't do used at all. Just a guess on now many % used games are compared to their new sales figures.

More sales are good, competition would be better.


Ahh I getcha.  When you start getting into mixed markets you really start to open some crazy potential situations.  As you mentioned earlier, used pricing is on a different platform in the UK vs the US.  I only really know about the US market.  To me, getting a used "new" (new: $60.00 launch game) game means paying $55.000 for it.  That $5 difference to me isn't worth it if I know that the dev is getting none of that $55.  If it were a $10 or $15 difference, it might move my needle a but.