Off Topic Thread, Week of 1/30/12: Tech Geek Edition

Sony already announced that the PS4 will be announced after the next xbox, Probably on the same kind of scale similar to the 360 then the Ps3, so a y ear later? honestly that article seems like more speculation then anything.

When you posed the question “What problem is this supposed to solve”, I read it as, “I don’t see a problem with the used game market”.

To your bottom line, initial attach rates for games could suffer but once you have a meaningful library of titles (generally by the 2nd holiday of a console lifecycle), you also have a meaningful portfolio of lower-priced games. Its not like game stay at $60 permanently…they lose their value pretty quickly with many games dropping by more than 10-15% in price in the first 3 months of its availability. I don’t know that users would attach at a lower rate, I think they’d just delay their purchase until later in the life cycle.

When I posit above about the number of people who would likely transition to full price games, I don’t think it is at all unreasonable to expect the vast majority of used game buyers to transition. If you invest $300-$500 in a piece of hardware, you’re going to buy games for it regardless of whether they’re new or used. You could make the argument that by incorporating this kind of technology, you risk deterring people from buying your console all together, but I don’t buy that either. Used game buyers heavily overlap with core console owners because only core console owners really shop at places like GameStop and other used game retailers. They’re going to upgrade to the next generation console at some point so long as they have a job to fund their habit.

If gamers average, 6 games a year, and they are forced to buy new, their total investment goes from $330 in a given year to $360 (using $55 for a used game and $60 for a new game). That means that they’re losing out on 1/2 of a game that they could have played in a given year. Taking these same investment #s, the publisher sees $0 of the $330, while they see their royalty cut of the $360 (say somewhere around 15-20%) or $66 of revenue for the publisher that they’re not currently realizing. Even if the majority of the money from that incremental $66 per used game buyer that transitions goes to fat cats and wealthy industrialists, that is still additional revenue that is going to go towards the next project.

My main point in all this, is that I’d still rather have the money in the hands of the creators, because they’re the only ones who can continue creating content on our behalf. Cutting GameStop out of the used game market is and always will be beneficial to both the publishers and the platforms regardless of whether they lose some small percentage of users who choose to give up gaming all together because they have to spend an extra $5 to buy their videogame.

And to be abundantly clear, I’m not anti-used games, I’m anti-GameStop selling used games. In a perfect world, a technology is created that prevents GameStop from buying back physical copies of games, but encourages gamers to “sell” their game to friends. They’d sell the game to their friend, for $55. The gamer who purchased the game first would receive % credit to their account (not cash), the rest would be split between publisher and platform. This way, gamers can still receive some credit back for buying the game, and publishers/platforms retain the net benefit of the sale of the game and any subsequent sales afterwards.

and you can’t tell me that GameStop being a game retailer helps move the industry forward…if gamers didn’t have GameStop, they’d just buy their games somewhere else.

sometimes I’ll click on rec, but it will show up as flagged, but then when I refresh, it counts as a rec.