Second Hand Sales: Against…

Believe it or not I don’t think that it’s the games companies right to gouge us for every penny that they can, but it is an unfortunate concequence of capitalism that it is their job and legal requirement to do so. I also believe that our ability to have second hand sales is going to go away sooner than later, and it’s the fault of everybody.

The Big Problem

The big problem is that games development as we know it is screwed. Studios are shedding staff faster than the industry can handle and talent is disappearing back into the real world of better paid jobs with sane working hours. I don’t think anybody believes that it can continue as it is; budgets are too high and it takes hundreds of people to make a game.

Because of this publishers play it safe; the majority of big games are from a very small pool of genres. Military shooters rule the day, whether they are WW2, modern day or sci-fi. What’s more only a couple of companies dominate that genre and it’s next to impossible to break into it if you’re not one of the favoured few.

What makes it even worse is that some developers themselves dominate entire genres. The western RPG is now in a shadow behind the giant that is Bioware and the sandbox game market is divided up into Rockstar and everybody else.

As a developer you’d be nuts to think that you could make it big with a new WW2 shooter, and in order to appear any different to the market you have to try something new and different, which usually dilutes the experience of what the game should be about in the first place. The last Wolfenstein springs instantly to mind as a game muddled by trying to appear different than everything around it.

Now normally this would be a good thing. Developers are forced to try new things, to innovate and experiment, and the genres grow because of this and the world is good. But budgets are now so high studios are on the edge of destruction with every release.

This is where second hand sales are a problem for the developers. If you buy your Red Dead Redemptions or Modern Warfares of this world odds are I’m guessing you tend to buy them new around the time of release. Those other titles though tend to drop through the cracks and when being compared with those monster titles look like they are less value so we wait. The prices will drop, the second hand copies will become available. We can get them cheaper if we’re patient.

The big problem is that the studio needs big sales week one or it’s screwed. There is no long tale in games sales anymore for most titles and so if a game doesn’t sell well at the start it’s going to be a failure. If we then buy second hand copies of these games then the publisher has no idea that the game was even interesting to lots of people. The problem is that in this time they’ve also decided that the game wasn’t popular so isn’t worth continuing with.

The Guilty Party?

Who is responsible for this problem? We’re all responsible for the general mess we’re in, but the primary people at fault are, I would say, the games shops. They could solve this instantly by paying some money to the publishers for second hand sales but it’s not in their interest to do so.

I can’t see the games shops as the good guys here doing the customers a favour as I’ve seem how they operate. They buy games back a week or so after release for not very much money and then re-sell them for a few pounds cheaper than the full price title on the same shelf. Of course you’re going to go for the second hand copy, it’s cheaper and isn’t going to have degraded any; it’s the same game as the full price one next to it. The only difference is that the shop makes a much higher profit on the second hand one than it does on the new one.

And why shouldn’t they? They’re running their own businesses after all and need the cash themselves to prop their side of the industry up. It’s not as if retail games sales are healthy as it is, the shops are in trouble because of digital downloads.

The Future

Games are too expensive to make and don’t sell enough to make this profitable for a large number of cases. Second hand sales make this worse, if people brought the games in the first place nobody would mind but innovation isn’t being rewarded by sales. Brutal Legend last year was an attempt to make a different game by one of the celebrated creative minds of the industry. It flopped. Forget if it was good or not, if one of the minds behind classics such as Monkey Island, Tim Schafer, can’t play then something is wrong.

After the failure of Brutal Legend the entire studio split up into groups and made game ideas. The best of these ideas are now being turned into games. This, to me, feels how game innovation should work: you let everybody be creative and take risks, you then make the best ideas and spread that risk around a bit more. The key though is that these are smaller games

Ron Gilbert, also of Monkey Island fame, released a game this year called Deathspank. It’s very fun, sort of a cross between Diablo and a parody of an MMO. It’s a smaller game and did very well. So well, in fact, that the sequel is being released months after the main game release.

The downloadable title seems to have come of age on the consoles. Finally. These games are smaller, cheaper to make with less people and therefore free to innovate. The industry is saved! The answer is what we always knew!

The Future of Second Hand

There’s a slight problem with this new future: It’s digital downloads. We’re now seeing that download games can sell 300k+ copies and it’s far more profitable to release it as a download than it is on DVD or blu-ray. For a start the number of companies that get a cut of that cash is smaller, you don’t have to pay the games shops and in many cases the big publisher doesn’t get a look in either.

My place in the second hand market

I never sell my games second hand as I never know when I will want to play them again, but I do buy second hand games. Over the last couple of months these have mainly been old PS2 games that I missed because I was a PC gamer back then. I like second hand games, in fact without it I’d never be able to play these classics.

That is my problem with second hand games. They’re driving the innovation and fun, the sort of game people like me are likely to want to buy second hand in the future, online onto proprietary online stores with their own DRM. These games also only last for as long as the licences for them to be sold remain valid. Already on the 360 and PS3 we’re seeing games go away from the download stores when companies go bankrupt. When Midway went under last the rights for lots of the remakes went away and so did the games from the stores. You can’t buy them any more.

In 20 years when I’ve grabbed an old 360 or PS3 from some charity shop for nostalgia reasons odds are I’ll not be able to find and play Deathspank. Today I’m still able to find games for the first home entertainment systems and collectors are free to play what they want. For this current generation that is going to be hard and is probably going to involve having to break the law to do it.

The problems are here now for disc based games already as well, and the publishers are clear that it’s because of second hand sales. In 20 years will I have access to the Cerberus network for my day 1, free in the box if I got the game new DLC on Mass Effect 2? It’s highly doubtful.

The move to digital is a horrible inevitability. It just cuts down on the costs too much, and caters to the all important impulse purchase market for anybody to ignore, but we’re held hostage over the rights to our own games that we’ve paid money for. At any time the license agreement states that they can take away our access to a game or the entire store. It removes all chances we have of shopping around for the lowest price as we can now and makes it impossible to legally obtain out of print games. The second hand market is accelerating that change by pushing developers away from retail and towards online. People can say that it’s all about choice and who owns the games they’ve paid for until the last shop closes, but in doing so we’re just pulling the time in which we lose all those things closer.