[batiudrami]

I'm guessing they expected a similar policy from Sony. Whether or not they had one and killed it after seeing the reaction to the XBox One is impossible to know, but we do know that publishers absolutely hate the used games industry, plus Microsoft (and Sony) take a cut of every new game sold so it's in their interest to move more new copies too.

I personally am not a fan of used games (I don't see it as being much better ideologically than piracy, since the people who made the game are not getting compensated on resales which provide an identical experience to one that you get brand new), but publicity-wise it's a very smart move on Sony's part.

[jordan0day]

"I personally am not a fan of used games (I don't see it as being much better ideologically than piracy, since the people who made the game are not getting compensated on resales which provide an identical experience to one that you get brand new)"

This argument is crazy. No one considers buying a user car grand theft auto, and no one considers being the second (or third, or tenth) owner of a house as some sort of scheme to defraud homebuilders.

Cars, homes, and video games are property. It should be the right of the property owner to do what they chose with their property, including selling it. The prices of new homes and new cars have been adjusted to compensate for the fact that that property will be resold. Why are video games any different?

If game publishers can't make a profit on their wares, they either need to charge more or spend less. The secondhand games market is not the problem, at all. The efforts of the publishers to kill off the secondhand market is a great example of the same sort of crappy, cartel-like practices we decry when it's done by, say, the wireless industry. The game industry shouldn't get a free pass to behave badly like this.

[batiudrami]

Haha, I knew it would be a controversial comment.

I've had this opinion for a while, and it comes from a perspective where, if you're prepared to look for it, all digital content is free. It can be pirated if you want, with a negligible prosecution risk. From there, I see two reasons to purchase content: either it's more convenient than piracy (Spotify, Steam), or you want to compensate those who worked hard on creating it.

Plus, I think that when you purchase a game, you're paying for an experience, rather than an object. For that matter, this is the same with books, and movies. You aren't paying for the paper it's printed on, or the disc in the case, it's the experience you have with the content - more of a consumable than a physical item. If you think this way, it's difficult to understand why you should be able to sell the distribution method and therefore transfer ownership of an experience.

There are issues with this argument, obviously. If you buy a DVD and have friends round to watch it, it seems silly that everyone should there should have to pay, which is a natural extension of this argument. I don't really have a solution to that.

The other issue with used games that I see, is that the only people making money off it are retailers. If I spend money on a game, it's because (as I noted earlier), I want the guys who worked hard on it to be compensated. If I buy a used game, I'm just giving money to GameStop.

Because I think games are experiences rather than physical objects, I don't think the property/cars/etc analogy holds. As I noted in another comment, buying a used car is not the same a new car, whereas buying a used game gives an identical experience to a brand new one.

[jordan0day]

I responded to your other comment below (about "identical experiences") and you responded to it, and I think we're closer to being conceptually on the same page than it might appear. But I'll go ahead and respond to this one, too.

I agree, a video game is more an experience than some functional, utilitarian object. (Interestingly, cars are often too sold as "experiences" -- maybe this is why their value decreases so precipitously after they've been driven off the lot, heh). I think that a game's value as an experience rather than "an object", though, is orthogonal to it's actual dollars-and-cents value. The value is the price people are willing to pay, plain and simple.

That is, a brand new, $60 game isn't really worth $60 to most people after it's been out for a couple of months. The used games market is more agile in recognizing this. If the first-party publishers became more agile, they'd wipe out the used games market. Why would I pay, say, $30 for a used, six month-old game, when I can get a brand new copy for the same price? The answer: I can't. The first-party publishers are still charging at least $40 or $50 for that game. The used games shop has recognized that the true value of that game, six months in, is actually $30. The publisher is in denial, or trying to take advantage of some sort of arbitrage by charging $40 or $50.

I think you're also discounting the fact that the first-party publishers do get a portion of that used games sale. That is, when someone buys a brand-new game at $60, and sells it to the used game shop for $30 a month later -- $30 of the original $60 purchase is coming from the used sale. Sure, in some cases the person buying that used copy for $35 or $40 might have bought a brand new copy if no used copies were available, but in many cases, that person might never have bought a copy at all. If the used market is shut down, maybe I stop buying the games when they're $60, because I know I can't get some portion of that money back to spend towards other games.

Anyway, as I noted in another comment, the price of a new car has not only the cost of materials and labor factored in, but also the cost of the probability that someone who buys that car used would have bought a new one instead, had the used car not been available. Video games should also be priced like this (I suspect they are, actually, and all the handwringing by the games industry is really just a misdirection).

TL;DR: In a free market, it doesn't matter if a good is experience-based of utility-based, its' price should reflect its actual value (which is determined by the market). Secondhand games aren't taking food out of developers mouths, inability to quickly adjust price to match actual value is. Shutting down the secondhand games market is a cartel/monopoly tactic, not actually beneficial for the general public.

[daeken]

I personally am not a fan of used cars (I don't see it as being much better ideologically than theft, since the people who made the car are not getting compensated on resales which provide an identical experience to one that you get brand new), but publicity-wise it's a very smart move on Honda's part.

[Negitivefrags]

If you are trying to compare games to cars, then the analogy doesn't translate to digital products at all.

Non-digital products degrade as they are used. A car only has a certain number of kilometres in it. The older the car is, the worse it is to drive and the more it costs to run.

Digital goods either work or they don't. If you buy the same digital good used then you get the exact same experience as the person who bought it new.

Things that don't wear out are just different.

[Dylan16807]

Cars degrade but not by very much. You sometimes have to repair new cars, you sometimes have to repair old cars.

Ignoring the fact that discs go bad, digital goods depreciate FAR faster than cars. A 15 year old car in good shape retains most of the value it had the day it was sold. A 15 year old game is barely worth anything.

[socillion]

Amusingly, an oft-mocked anti-piracy commercial uses the slogan "you wouldn't steal a car", directly comparing digital media with cars. I'm not sure if GP was referencing it, but that's what jumped to mind when I saw this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU&t=5s

[jordan0day]

The degradation of the non-digital product isn't what's important -- it's the value of that product that is important. Oftentimes (like in the case of most cars), the value is closely related to that degradation, but that's just the case for cars.

The value of a digital product like a video game declines over time, as well, even though the data on the disc doesn't degrade. The experience degrades. If that weren't the case, the used games store would be able to sell a used game for a lot more than they do.

If publishers and studios really want to kill the used games market, they'd acknowledge that their games lose value over time, and drop the prices over time accordingly. Which they do, just not enough, apparently.

[Negitivefrags]

Those are two types of value degradation, and I don't think you can compare those either.

A used game can be sold next to a new game at the same point in time and the used game will be priced cheaper. You will get an identical experience regardless of which you buy, that is to say, the real value of both is identical.

The shop only prices it cheaper to encourage you to buy it, because they have a higher profit margin on used games.

If you drive a car about for 50,000KM and put it back in the shop, now that car is has lower real value than the new one next to it.

[jordan0day]

"A used game can be sold next to a new game at the same point in time and the used game will be priced cheaper."

"The shop only prices it cheaper to encourage you to buy it, because they have a higher profit margin on used games."

So why isn't it the publishers job to ensure that neither of these statements are true? That is, two months in, why haven't they dropped the price of the new game enough to make it attractive compared to the used copy? If they can't make any new sales because the used copies are so much cheaper, what's the point of maintaining that price?

[Negitivefrags]

The economics of used games just don't work that way.

Before the player has played the game, the value of the game disk is shown to be at least $60 dollars to that person. They show that by paying that price.

Once a player has completed a single player game, the value of the disk to that person is now zero. Given the opportunity, they will sell the game at any price they can get. They will happily trade the game in for $5.

To a new player coming along, they may still pay $60, but if there is a used (and effectively identical) copy sitting there for $55, why not buy that instead?

A shop will price match a used game down to below any price that a publisher could conceivably wish to charge because they only pay a tiny price for the identical product used.

> That is, two months in, why haven't they dropped the price of the new game enough to make it attractive compared to the used copy?

The comparison is meaningless because they are identical. The cheaper price always wins, and the used game will always have the cheaper price.

Used cars are fundamentally different than digital goods due to the fact that they can be consumed infinitely without devaluing the physical asset.

[batiudrami]

You don't get an identical experience with a used car. The car has wear on parts, a shorter warranty, uncertainty regarding previous treatment and servicing, and no 'new car smell'.

With a used game, assuming the disc itself hasn't been damaged (and if it has, you are entitled to a refund as per any retailer's used games policy), you get an identical experience to a person who purchased the game new.

[jordan0day]

But the price of that used car is also adjusted to reflect the wear/warranty/uncertainty. In an efficient market, the price of a car, used or new, reflects the actual value of that car.

Why should games be considered any different?

You also don't get an "identical experience" to a person who purchased the game new. The bits on the disc may be identical, but the experience isn't. For example, a game bought new in 2009 might look great in 2009, but by 2013 you've come to expect more. Likewise, there may be fewer players online for multiplayer experiences. There's also all sort of additional intangibles -- you probably won't be the first person in your peer group to play the game, so you can't brag how you beat it faster than someone else, or have the same feeling of shared experience when you ask "did you get past level X? How did you beat the lava golem?", and their response is "I don't know, I did that like two years ago."

The analogy isn't perfect, but hopefully it's illustrative enough. At the end of the day, both cars are video games have a certain value when new, and a certain, probably lessened, value when "used". The characteristics by which the value has decreased from new to used are different, but they're extant in both cases.

[batiudrami]

>The bits on the disc may be identical, but the experience isn't. For example, a game bought new in 2009 might look great in 2009, but by 2013 you've come to expect more.

That's a fair point. But a new copy of a game bought today that was released in 2009 will also cost closer to $5 than $60 - the decreased experience in that sense is already reflected in the retail price.

For me, ideally what would happen is that used game sales would go away [1], and as a result games would become cheaper, either when they first go on sale, or through heavy discounting more frequently (because people only have a set amount of money to spend on games).

This is essentially what has already happened with PC - there are no resale options, and prices discount far, far more quickly than on consoles. If you want the 'day one experience' as you described, you can get that, for $60. But you have the knowledge that, if you wait, it'll also be available for $30 in 3 months time, and $10 in the Christmas sales. Plus, on every single copy sold, ~70% of the money is returned to the publisher/developer.

[1] edit: As I noted elsewhere, I still think you should be able to lend games to friends. That is, I think, beneficial to publishers and consumers.

[jordan0day]

I think we've both said the things we wanted to say in this thread, so further replies might not be especially useful -- I just want to point out that I think your pricing decrease algorithm needs a little tweaking: Aliens: Colonial Marines, which got generally terrible reviews, was released on Steam on Feb. 12. So, four months ago. It's only dropped $10 in that time ($59.99 to $49.99).

I don't doubt that the publisher has probably done a little thinking about whether they'd sell enough copies at $30 rather than $50 to make up for the loss of per-sale profit, but it seems to me that what they (the publishers) are actually trying to do, by killing secondhand sales, is have their cake and eat it, too.

[batiudrami]

It depends on the game. At the other extreme, Borderlands 2 was released in September at $60, was $30 by October and $14 by May. I suspect that the reputation of Aliens: Colonial Marines is so bad that price reductions aren't helping.

I suspect that publishers would love to be able to kill used games and maintain current pricing strategies, but I just don't think it'll work for them. Video game sales are too price elastic and, like you said, for people who would ordinarily buy new at $60 and resell at $30, their video gaming budget would only buy half the games it used to. These people would be more likely to wait until the games were $30.

In a worst-case scenario, if publishers persisted with that strategy, other forms of entertainment may be seen as more appealing and money might disappear from the video games industry.

Like you've said, the free market would take care of it, and I think used games are standing in the way of that being able to happen while allowing maximum compensation for the developers.

[anologwintermut]

I personally am not a fan of used men/women (I don't see it as being much better ideologically than theft, since the people who made them are not getting compensated on resales which provide an identical experience to one that you get brand new), but publicity-wise it's a very smart move on ...

In case its not obvious, whether or not the product deteriorates has about as much to do with the legality/morality of selling a used game as my sarcastic quip does.

[frou_dh]

Many gamers like to buy and play games day 1, so something that's not retained in used games is riding the crest of the hype/community wave.

[FreeKill]

I've never bought a used game myself, or sold one, but there have been probably hundreds of times over the life of my Xbox 360 where I've visited with friends and family and brought a good game along with me. Especially, more social games like Just Dance or Rock Band or Kinect Sports. If they truly locked down sharing of games, this kind of functionality would be a big loss. I know they have said that some limited taking of games with you would be permitted, but I think they missed the boat on selling that functionality by being so vague about it...

[batiudrami]

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm all for that. Microsoft has been unclear about how people will be allowed to do that but it would be very unfortunate if that was disallowed.

[signed0]

Do you also believe then that buying a used book or checking one out from library is the same as piracy?