There has been an unpleasant development in the world of gaming in recent months that is threatening to change the way we look at games. While the console war rages on unabated publishers and developers have drawn their own battle lines ready to engage you and I, the humble gamer, should we dare to buy second hand.
The pre owned market for games has been around for as long as there have been home systems to play them on and in austere times such as these it's growing. Just recently Tesco announced they will start taking trade in games , after a successful trial, joining the likes of Asda, Game, Blockbuster and Hmv. The trade in / pre owned market is clearly something retailers like the idea of and judging by the online forums, and my own experience, gamers think is great too. The only people who don't like the idea are the publishers. It all started with EA and "Project $10", a simple enough proposition to charge $10 for users to play online unless they enter a one time only code that comes with the game. In effect, EA want gamers who buy pre owned to pay play online. Then came THQ, Activision and Ubisoft, all with their own ideas to make buying pre owned a less attractive proposition. But no other industry does it! Why would they do this? Well, if you were to believe everything you read, buying a pre owned game takes food out of the mouths of developers children. Actual food! By not paying £45 for Modern Warfare 2 you're actually taking spaghetti o's away from poor Timmy...
The argument is simple enough: when you buy a new game the developer, publisher and retailer all get a piece of the action and everyone gets paid for the work they put in. When you buy pre owned only the retailer gets any money, so the talent involved in making the game gets nothing. This is obviously true but omits an important part of the picture, one the publishers don't want you to think about because they want their extra money. For every game purchased pre owned, every single game, there was a transaction before where the original purchaser was paid and that same purchaser gave up the right to play the game. What that means to this situation is that if I sell a copy of Fifa 10 to my friend, let's call him Bill for argument's sake, then I can no longer play that game, online or otherwise, but Bill can. The number of copies of the Fifa 10 sold by EA doesn't change, which is what they don't like, but the number of players online, using EA's servers and bandwidth and needing support etc., hasn't changed.
In essence what these publishers are saying is that if you were not the original purchaser of the game and therefore have not directly put money into their hands you can't play. They incur no extra cost thanks to the pre owned market but are seeking to charge some perceived loss. It's also important to consider the other feature of the pre owned market, one that the publishers should be embracing rather than alienating. A couple of weeks ago I bought Wet for PS3, developed by Besthesda Softworks (they of Fallout fame) and published by ZeniMax Europe Ltd. (The owner of Besthesda and others and who have yet to suggest any anti pre owned tactics). I bought Wet pre owned from Game for £9.99 for two reasons: 1) because I can't afford to pay full price for any game at the moment and 2) because Wet had mixed reviews and I didn't want to feel I'd wasted my money. At £9.99 it was just under that magic barrier where I felt it was worth the risk and as a result I now own a copy of Wet. I played that copy of Wet and thoroughly enjoyed it, in fact I went online as soon as the credits rolled to look for news of a sequel. A sequel which I'm more than likely to buy brand new as soon as it comes out. The same could be said for Borderlands, which I've also bought all the DLC for and several other games. You see what the big scary boys at EA et al seem to forget is that the more people who get their hands on a game the better. Better for the publisher, the developer, the retailer, the gamers. I've lost track of how many sequels I've bought over the years but what I do know is a significant proportion of those would not have been bought, new I may add, were it not for an initial pre owned purchase of a game I was unsure about.
So what's the solution? Clearly someone somewhere is feeling screwed or greedy and needs things fixing. Firstly, if developers are feeling short changed then they need to either find other ways of getting their work out there, Steam, Xbox Live and PSN Store all negate the pre owned problem, or they need to negotiate better deals with the publishers. Secondly, if the publishers want to sell more copies then they should reduce the cost to the consumer. £40 - £50 is a lot of money to a lot of people (but apparently not if you subscribe to Xbox Live in which case it's "nothing" according to web forums). If new games cost less then people would be more inclined to take a risk on an unknown title or, as many do, pay that bit more just to have new. We all know development costs have spiralled in recent years to that of movie budgets in some cases (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reportedly costing $40 -$50 million) but it isn't necessary to spend that much to make a great game, it isn't even necessary to spend that much to make AAA titles. When you consider the audience for games is growing and the chances of success hinging upon perceived value for money (as demonstrated by Braid, Flow, Flower, Limbo etc.) publishers should be more inclined to make games cheaper and get them into the hands of more and more gamers by any means possible.
I've seen people liken this situation to many other things, "Ford gets no cut of the resale of my car", but the best example would be the music industry, not least because it's structure mirrors that of the games industry quite closely. When I like a band, song, artist or whatever I tell all my friends. Quite often I'll make them a copy of a CD or send them an mp3. While this is actually piracy, far worse than resale, what often happens is my friends like the band, song, artist too and buy themselves the CD, vinyl etc. And then we all buy tickets to see them live. By sharing / spreading / disseminating the work in the first place the artist gets a larger return. It's the same with pre owned games, by allowing more people to experience the work of Naughty Dog or Bungie or Media Molecule more people are likely to buy games by them in the future.
Finally, there's the rest of the reasons why pre owned should be encouraged not penalised: Reselling a game is recycling it and therefore potentially saves resources. In times of financial difficulty pre owned sales help keep retailers in business and people in a job. Luxury purchases, which games are, become available to more people and help stimulate the economy. In the end there's no need to say, "but no other industry does it", there's just the truth: the big companies are looking for more money and could give a damn about customer loyalty. If it gets to the point where it costs too much to buy pre owned or we have to choose between pre owned or multiplayer then we'll stop buying those games. The industry will become less inventive, less likely to risk a new IP and eventually collapse again. No one wants that so maybe the war on pre owned needs to stop before it starts.
Cheers,
R.
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