Is Braben losing it? ...and other musings.

[Scrobbs]

Further to his woolly dicussion of 'Uncanny valley' Braben has spoken out about pre-owned games.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/braben-calls-for-action-against-pre-owned-sales

"We can make pre-owned detectable, we can put a code on the disc or the packaging... We should be doing something and it should result, in the longer term, in cheaper retail prices, which helps us all."

Notwithstanding the point that the second hand trade has grown up around games being so damn expensive in the first place (althoguh coders have to eat!), the practice of tagging discs seems a bit strange - aren't they tagged anyway with a big orange sticker that says, "Pre-owned"?

I also get the impression (not being involved in it), that at it's heart, the computer games industry is akin to the 'old' model of the music industry - with the major labels (e.g. Sony BMG, EMI etc) raking in most of the cash. Admittedly they supply the cash for the actual production of the game before revenue can be earned.

Is this why some devs are moving towards releasing incremental games (c.f. GT5 prologue), and why MMO makers rush a product out the door then fix everything later.

Am I completely wrong?

[Dr.Gash]

Y'know what else results in cheaper prices? Digital Distribution. Plus it gets rid of the "problem" of pre-owned resales.

Personally, I only really got into games when I realised I could trade them in at the local indie retailer. It meant I could afford the hobby even when I was a kid.

[DanJW]

Yeah, I rarely use highstreet stores any more. For instance, the recent news about Okami not selling well enough; I went to every major retailer and they didn't have it. I ordered it from Play.com and it arrived next day. In future I'm not even going to bother checking the high street first.

I will occasionally drop into one of the tiny indie stores to see if they have anything old, obscure and cheap that I might like. But usually they don't and it's just the type of EA shovelware rubbish that I didn't care about even when it came out.

If there is a problem with second hand retail, then the problem is not the people buying and reselling. It is the stores themselves. And since the Publishers have so much clout with the rest of the industry I don't feel at all sympathetic when they act all helpless in this particular case.

[n0wak]

"We can make pre-owned detectable, we can put a code on the disc or the packaging... We should be doing something and it should result, in the longer term, in cheaper retail prices, which helps us all."

That's such bullshit. Yeah. When you remove the cheaper alternatives to first-day overpriced games, the prices of the first-day titles are going to decrease? Really? Without that internal competition? If anything, it'd give them reason to charge more since there wouldn't be any alternative. I mean, christ, isn't that kind of shit patently obvious? Madden didn't miraculously lose half its MSRP after EA killed off any NFL competition.

I'm in favour of second hand retail -- it's how I got some of my rarer games and the like -- but at the same time I have no sympathy for the scamtastic major retailers that buy games for a third of their value and then sell them, used, for something like $5 or $10 off the price of the new one. That's bullshit and I'd encourage the major publishers going after these type of retailers, but don't go after the entirety of the second hand market. You'll only hurt kids on allowances and people that can't afford to pay $70 for your shitty annual sports games.

[Roderick]

I'm actually comfortable paying 50/60 Euros for a game I really like. Something like GTA4; totally worth it. But everything else, the not-really-classics or chances I take, I won't pay more than 30 Euros for. That can either be second-hand copies or waiting until it appears in the bargain bin.

[Nachimir]

To be fair, I always want to pick his talks to bits because they have such a shitload of handwavey, unsubstantiated statements in them, but that was actually one of the most sensible parts of his talk. Data on pre-owned sales would be useful to publishers and developers.

That said, all I could think about during most of that bit was "Fucking hell! Halve the price and you'd probably sell more than twice as many!"

[ThunderPeel2001]

He's been saying that for a few years now, but I've also heard things about his mental stability. Back in 1993, for example, he accused Amiga Power of having a vendetta against him and deliberately doctoring screenshots of Frontier to make it look bad... just because they gave it a (very deserved) 65% (or 75% on the A1200).