“Chicken or the Egg?” “El Camino – car or truck?” “Used games – great for building audience, or scourge that will bring down the industry?” These are all Sisyphus-ian questions that only get more divisive with educated conversation.
The heat got turned up on the used games issue this week, with Amazon’s announcement of their new used games trade-in program. Gamestop stock immediately plummeted 14% on the news, and then the real fireworks started.
Dave Perry, a guy whose opinion I respect, named names and called out the ECA on not addressing the issue with big retailers. Dave Jaffe and GamePolitics’ Dennis McCauley also weighed in, at opposite sides of the spectrum. Let’s face it, this issue has been simmering for over a decade now.
I hardly ever buy used, simply because I’m usually buying on release day. I’m willing to bet this is true for most hardcore gamers. But as Nintendo has proven time and time again in the last 3 years, casual gamers are a much bigger audience. And there’s no way a parent will choose a $60 brand new game over a $45 used copy of the same title that’s guaranteed to work, and is available at the same store. 
It would be easy to say that all this hand wringing and carrying on is worthless. After all, used games is an issue that WILL go away eventually. When was the last time you bought a CD?
But the seismic shift in audience we’ve seen over the last few years means the switch to all-downloadable will be even harder to flip. Before, we could count on at least a healthy majority of console owners being tech saavy, early adopter types. But the more casual gamers, and the people (read: parents) that make those purchasing decisions expect to walk in to a brick-and-mortar retailer or hop onto a site like Amazon and get a physical piece of media at the end of that process. You can’t put a download-only title under the tree on Christmas morning.
For the time being, we will have to continue putting games on discs, putting discs in boxes, and relying on retail to move them off shelves. And like it or not, there will be SOME form of reconsumption without any additional compensation to the developer. Especially in rough economic times. Even if the ECA strikes an unbelievable deal with every retailer under the sun tomorrow, you’ll still have rental, players swapping games with each other, and E-Bay for starters.
The onus on developers is to build additional value into new copies, and create compelling downloadable content that can generate revenue from used game purchasers. Microsoft Game Studios was really on to something when they packaged each new copy of Gears of War 2 with a unique, one-time-only redemption code for downloadable maps. And GTAIV’s Lost and the Damned DLC will no doubt generate a ton of revenue for Rockstar, from both owned-it-since-launch-day die hards and used game bargain hunters that just picked it up this week.
2 responses so far ↓
Tony Cottone // March 15, 2009 at 12:29 pm |
I’m surprised that you haven’t written something about Street Fighter 4. And how back in the day, putting a quarter on a Street Fighter 2 arcade game “meant something.”
Rich // March 19, 2009 at 10:18 pm |
Y’know, I’d love to be writing about SFIV right now, but I just haven’t had time to PLAY the thing. But on that note – it is a little weird to think about how this series was really made for the arcades, and now here we are with 4 finally hitting the shelves, and they’re all but extinct. I only saw the arcade game once, here in Chinatown.