Old vs. New
Recently I saw a video of someone debating used vs. new games.
I fully understood the arguments seeing new games mean: full gain for the developer. Games only have their sales income to actually make money, and don’t have royalties like music cd’s or the theater views movies do. Movies get the DVDs as extras and then the rights are sold to the television channels to make even more money. I reckon you get my point by now. Games are a ‘hit or miss’ kind of thing. If the overall sale of the game goes bad, this could actually mean the end for small developers.
Then there’s of course DLC to gain a little extra income. Sadly once again if the game doesn’t sell that well, or even if it sells well, but isn’t as interesting as the trailers made it out to be, then the DLC purchases will not be that grand. This has got me thinking: There has got to be a way to rid the gamers from their used games and still give the developers the money they need to further develope games. I understand why people actually buy used games. People are daunted by the rather high cost of current and next gen games but it has to be known, making games with these kind of graphical grandeur and the possibilities added, isn’t cheap. The money could buy you several houses and a car per house and all the luxury you could think of. Triple A titles are custom to a 6-7 digit budget… Again if you want to compare numbers to movies, know that the money they make, are from theater views only, it doesn’t handle the money made from the sale after it has come out on dvd.
This is what I came up with:
When you have a used game you want to get rid of, instead of selling it to a store, you’d send it to the publisher or a store that deals with the publishers. They give you a code, which gives you the value of the game. That value will be added to your account and the account could be stocked up with credit from your bank account. The dev account can be used to purchase new games, or second hand titles from that specific developer. If you could look up the rate for the game you could decide right then and there whether or not you really want to give up the game for that amount. Another thing would be, that games you hand in will only get you credits for a game of the same console.Meaning, you hand in an Xbox 360 title, you get credit for an Xbox 360 title.
The reason I’d categorize the titles per developer, is because they would decide the pricings and the gains would be theirs completely. If you’d put a multi developer platform in place, you’d create another middle man. You’d create another platform that would try and get some ‘profit’ on the sales. That money wouldn’t benefit the developer. It could turn out as another party that would push customers into buying a second hand title.
I’m not saying game stores should be banned, but I believe there should be a way for developers and creators of games to get some extras from the resale of games. Currently it’s a big profit for the middle man and sadly, only him.
I don’t buy used games, with some exceptions that is, namely f the game is nowhere to be found. If I have the chance to purchase a title at retail price, I normally do. It’s partly distrust, and after having heard exactly where the profits from second hand games go, and just how large the profit on them is, I’m shying away even more from second hand games. Sadly even the online stores have their limits. PSN/XBLA doesn’t offer you all titles. If this were to exist, I’d happily shop there.
What do you think? Do you agree? Do you have any other ideas?
Old vs. New,
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Personally I can agree on a certain extent but you only cover the situation of when you are the one trying to sell the game you are currently owning.
What about those who wish to purchase second hand games? Any ideas on that matter? I mostly agree on purchasing new games, seeing I tend to collect games. (Of course for retro stuff this isn’t possible anymore) Sadly, there are a bunch of younger gamers or even older gamers who don’t have the budget to buy that many titles at full retail price.