Last week, Gabe over at Penny Arcade held an open forum about the stores who re-sell games. To quote him off of his Twitter account @cwgabriel - "I have personally made a choice to support the people who make games rather than a pawn shop." I pitched in my own reply in Twitter, but I wanted to take some time this week to write my own thoughts about these stores that re-sell games.
First, video gaming is effing expensive. Your average game these days is $60 for the non collectible / non -legendary /no super amazing with also no bonus rocket pack edition. Most games want to be able to maximize their sales, so they create them around the ESRB rules to get them rated as appropriate for children or teenagers (The ESA Reports that 84% of all games sold in 2008 were E, T, or E10+). What that means is that kids and teens want to play these games, and unless something's changed since I was a kid, they can't afford to buy them by themselves, as they can't really get jobs.
So what happens? Well, piracy for one, but that's not what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the legal way to be able to catch a break on the prices of the upcoming new hotness hitting your console of choice. Kids go out and they trade their last week's toy in for some store credit, usually a pittance, and buy a used copy of the game that somebody else did pretty much the same thing with. These stores then take that game, and sell it at an amazing profit to the next person who is also looking for a break in the game prices.
So who gets hurt here? The game studios and developers and publishers, of course. In the scenario I created above, one copy of the game was sold, but two different people were able to play it, AND somebody made money off of letting the second person play.
The game industry obviously sees this as a problem and has recently been taking steps to combat it. The more noticeable methods include offering something extra like a free set of multi-player maps for purchasing the game new, or a special skin for pre-ordering, and then charging for the extra content to anybody who didn't buy their game new. EA has taken this a step further in offering only the single player version of their game on the disc, but including a code to enable multi-player for free in the box, and then charging for it for those who have bought the game used.
So after presenting my views on both sides of the argument, where do I stand? Well, I can't condemn the people buying used games. I've purchased used games, I've sold my games on eBay, I've borrowed them from friends. I can't really blame the guys on the industry side either, though. They work hard to bring forth quality entertainment to the masses and deserve to make some money doing it. The US Inflation Calculator site reports that the $50 that we spent on a game back in 1987 would be $95.96 in today's money, and all they've done is increase their prices to $60 (that's a rant for another day).
There's no easy solution for this. Despite their efforts, restricting multi-player and providing Club Rewards will not stop people from buying used games. Game developers have created a product that the people want, but are unable to afford at the rate that they are becoming available. Just from my last The Ones to Watch article, I had 7 different games, and if you average them at $50 apiece, there's no way that anybody can keep up with all of that. So in response, the people are looking for any way they can find to save some money on their hobby. The stores who buy and sell used games have moved into that market to capitalize on the situation.
In the end, the solution that we seem to be coming up on is downloadable games. We've already seen some success with this, in that the Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and Steam (to name a few) all provide the ability to download games and lock them to a specific ID so they can't be shared or sold. Once internet speeds, prices, and availability reach a proper level, we'll see studios put their games out ONLY online. This doesn't really help consumers, unfortunately, but this is what things will come to when the game companies are fed up with other stores making profit off of their work.
I'm eager to see what company fires their first shot on exclusive online sales. That's going to be one hell of a press release.
