12 ms·

Most people don't realize this but GameStop was actually very bad for console game developers. Games were often resold, with each time no revenue going to the

Most people don't realize this but GameStop was actually very bad for console game developers. Games were often resold, with each time no revenue going to the developer. I worked on a popular Xbox / PS3 game that was resold like 7-9 times on average. Our marketing people figured that GameStop made a lot more money on the game than the developer. Why is that bad? Big console games started to need to be really long, because if you could finish them in a week you would lose a ton of sales to retail. That's why you started to see games where you had to wander around, grind, play through a level backwards, chase achievements. It also caused an emphasis on in game purchases (in console games) and online play. It just got a lot harder to make a short single player game on console. A lot of those problems go away as console games are sold in a digital store.

proverbialbunny 6y ago
Is that why games have gotten shorter? I'm from the NES - PS1 era of gaming where games would regularly take 60+ hours to play through. FFVII is still one of my all time favorites and is a good example of that. I think the first real fast game I played through was Metal Gear Solid. I'd rent, then buy if I liked it back then, and I played through all of Metal Gear Solid in something like 2 or 3 days. It was the first game I enjoyed that I did not buy, because I beat it while renting it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TylerE 6y ago
  We're obviously remembering different NES games. The NES games I remember could generally be beaten in no more than an hour, if you knew how to actually do it without dying 1000 times. A good warpless speedrun time on Super Mario Brothers is about 19 minutes. If warps are allowed, it's under 5. Legend of Zelda? 27 minutes Ninja Gaiden? 12 minutes
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    It's a bit absurd going off of speed runs is a way to accurately identify a game's normal play length. I think all the games I had were 60+ hours, but I just liked JRPGs more than most genres. FFVIII was picked not only because it was one of my favorites (FF1 too, SMB3, ...), because the remake today has turned it into 3 games, and even then those 3 games seem long by today's standards.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      There's a bit of difference between an NES and as PSX, which came out a full 2 generations and 12 years later. The NES didn't have any way of saving, for instance. The two have about much in common as a PSX and an Xbox1.
      - proverbialbunny 6y ago
        Most NES games had a way of saving, except the earliest NES games. Most of them had codes you'd type in that was a save point. Many had actual save states on the cartridge. The earlier games got around not having a code by having a secret early on the game that was revealed later on in the game so you could skip all of the parts you previously played.
        TylerE 6y ago
        I wouldn't consider codes a save. They often loss state. Basically just an encoding of "start at level X with Y lives". Maybe not even lives. There were only 54 NES releases with actual, battery based saves, out of 716 officially released and licensed titles (and heaven knows how many bootlegs). So, "most" is an overbid.
        proverbialbunny 6y ago
        Well, most of the ones I wanted to play at least. ^_^
      - 6y ago
- robrtsql 6y ago
  It seems to me that you're mostly talking about RPGs. I can't think of any NES-PS1 platforming/shooter/action games that had 60 hours worth of content. If you look at today's RPGs, they're still _really long_. It is expected that most players who play Persona 5 Royal will take over 100 hours to complete it, which is pretty wild considering it's not a 'grinding game'--players aren't taking that long because they're fighting the same enemies repeatedly hoping for a rare item to appear. There really is 100 hours' worth of contents.
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    FFVII was used as an example because the re-release is 3 games, and each game is considered long for today's standards.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      They're adding a ton of content, though.
- decafninja 6y ago
  When console games started selling for $59.99 (or more), I found it difficult to justify purchasing most single player games unless they really were jaw-droppingly amazing because the hours to dollars ratio started becoming very low. Meanwhile a multiplayer game - whether it be a MMORPG or a FPS, would net you countless hours of entertainment.
  - kod 6y ago
    > When console games started selling for $59.99 (or more) So last century? Big single player 16 bit games were $80usd (e.g. Phantasy Star II) and $59.99 was not unusual for run of the mill licensed or sports games. https://i.redd.it/ikerxbqipf821.jpg https://i.redd.it/ikerxbqipf821.jpg It's amazing that 59.99 survived as a standard price for games as long as it did.
    - dx87 6y ago
      People look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them 59.99 for a game is a bargain compared to the amount of value you get with modern titles. I remember buying Nintendo and Sega games for the same price. Magazines only covered the biggest games, so the most informed you could be as a consumer is based on how cool the box art was, and most could be finished in an afternoon once you figured out the cheap mechanics designed to force you to start over.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    > Meanwhile a multiplayer game - whether it be a MMORPG or a FPS, would net you countless hours of entertainment. Not always. Consider that there are now so many the pool of potential co-players is spread among many. And servers don't stay up forever. As a patient gamer I usually miss the first wave. Then you're at a big disadvantage in skill or level. And frankly there are so many jerks online that I prefer single player even if it means moving on to other games more often.
- pfranz 6y ago
  I think there's a bit of bias in the games you played. There have been externalities affecting game design since the NES. Early NES games were modeled (or ported) after arcades, which incentivized you to put in a quarter, play a handful of minutes, then put in a quarter to continue. This didn't translated well at home. So game designs moved away from that format. When movie rental places started offering games (late NES early SNES days) they started making games take longer than a rental period to beat (2-3 days). One well known example is the monkey puzzle in the Lion King game [1]. I distinctly remember renting NES games and beating them in a few days before returning them. Specifically, one of the later Mega Man games. Granted, I owned other Mega Man games so I was familiar with the format. I still would have loved to play that game over and over, but I only rarely was able to buy games. [1] https://www.thegamer.com/lion-king-remaster-monkey-level-controversy/ https://www.thegamer.com/lion-king-remaster-monkey-level-con...
iNerdier 6y ago
You say this as if people shouldn’t be able to resell information, as packaged in a disc. Does this extend to other things, would you want to prohibit used book sales for example, or cars from being resold? The ability to resell books didn’t lead to only works the size of war and peace being sold...
- whynotminot 6y ago
  Not really comparable. For example, the cost to produce a major book release does not scale nearly as quickly as the cost of producing a modern AAA video game.
  - jasonpeacock 6y ago
    There is a massive secondary market for cars, and those costs scale much higher than producing a AAA video game, but you don't see car manufacturers blaming used car lots? Perhaps the game's price should reflect the cost of production, or they should limit the cost of production to what's sustainable by sales.
    - whynotminot 6y ago
      Also an entirely different industry, with entirely different costs, constraints, and production practices. Can we stop using oranges as we talk about apples? While we're here though, actually, yes, car manufacturers would love it if people would stop buying used cars. In fact, there were whole lawsuits in the past about planned obsolescence, and dealers today often run promotions to get you to turn in your used "clunker" and buy a new ride.
      - georgeecollins 6y ago
        And also, what do you think warranties, dealer repair shops , and certified pre-owned cares are about? They are trying to take a cut of that business? If we could sell our games as a "certified pre-owned" DVD then it would have made a lot more sense to make a short, tight little single player game.
oh_sigh 6y ago
Same problem with libraries in my opinion.
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  I am not making a moral judgement, I am saying that the shape of the business affects the quality and the style of the art. Movie theaters are dying and it seems like they may be replaced by streaming services like Netflix. The truth is, for all streamers pay they probably won't end up paying as much as theaters. And it is not clear any of them currently make money. What if the model that really makes money is YouTube, and a lot of classic expensive movies are going to be replaced with mediocre user generated content that is extremely profitable to stream? That may sound crazy, but think what happened to radio? I am not seriously arguing that I know what will happen, but you just have to understand that when there is a good buisiness for high quality, you tend to get quality.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > The truth is, for all streamers pay they probably won't end up paying as much as theaters. I feel like your average $200M movie could be made for $100M and not be harmed all that much. > What if the model that really makes money is YouTube, and a lot of classic expensive movies are going to be replaced with mediocre user generated content that is extremely profitable to stream? Then tons of money will flow into creating youtube content, and competition will provide a bounty of high quality content. > That may sound crazy, but think what happened to radio? This is a good example of how things shouldn't be mediocre. TV shows aren't lower quality than radio shows, once they got some momentum going.
toast0 6y ago
> Most people don't realize this but GameStop was actually very bad for console game developers. Games were often resold, with each time no revenue going to the developer. I worked on a popular Xbox / PS3 game that was resold like 7-9 times on average. Our marketing people figured that GameStop made a lot more money on the game than the developer. I'm more willing to pay $X for a game if I know I can probably sell it for $Y when I don't want it anymore. Digital store games don't have the same value for me, I can't sell the games later, and depending on the system, might have a big hassle transferring them to a different system if/when the one I have goes south. Book publishers (and authors) don't get anything when I buy from a used bookstore, or borrow a book from a friend either. Neither does a cookware manufacturer get anything if I buy used pots and pans from a thrift shop.
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  Right, but in that model you got a couple dollars, game stop gets like 5x and the developer loses a sale that would be 10-20x. Books cost tens of thousands of dollars to make and games cost tens of millions. There would be no video game business like the one we know if they were sold the same way as books. Think about it a second-- your PlayStation game is sold on a piece of media that is proprietary. Are your books sold on proprietary paper made specially difficult to copy?
  - toast0 6y ago
    Gamestop certainly wouldn't pay enough for me to sell to them; I'd rather sell or give to a friend, or sell on a marketplace for somewhere between Gamestop's buy and sell prices. Most of the independent used game shops have tighter spreads as well. This past year, I bought Animal Crossing for the Switch; even though I was pretty sure I wouldn't like it. As expected, I didn't like it, but I had a friend who wanted it, and I could mail it to them. That's a "lost sale" in video game accounting; but if it was tied to my switch, I would have never bought it, and my friend wasn't planning to buy it, but is thrilled to have it. A book doesn't need to be intentionally made difficult to copy, because in its natural form, it's a lot of effort to copy. There's not enough money to be saved by copying a book to make it worthwhile, except for maybe textbooks. Arcade manufacturers don't get a cut of the quarters put into a machine either (well, maybe they do for some of the games that now need an online connection to run).
grillvogel 6y ago
used game sales (as well as used sales of all other media) have always existed. this was not a cause of any problem for console game developers until around 2005 or so. the mid 2000s switch to the "next gen" platforms caused a lot of shittiness for gaming. mostly from publisher greed due to the potential for mass profits, and the increased cost of developing at higher fidelity. games were originally for a more niche audience, used to focus more on difficulty over "content" in order to get replay value and lifespan. but if you lower the difficulty you can hopefully get more players experiencing all of your "content", and hopefully you can get them to buy some more after they complete the main part of your game.
monksy 6y ago
> Most people don't realize this but GameStop was actually very bad for console game developers. And I feel 0 empathy for you. With the digital platform you are stripping away ownership rights from the purchaser. From your statement I feel that you're whining about missing sales that you never could have actually had. Do the 7-9 extra sales translate to 7-9x more sales on digital platforms? No.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ABeeSea 6y ago
  This argument is misleading because even if it’s not the full 7-9, it is certainly greater than 0. We can argue what the exact percentage is, but saying there was 0 lost sales is just as wrong as saying 7-9 lost sales.
  - monksy 6y ago
    It is slightly more, yes. However, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that it's as significant as they claim. The people buying used games don't feel that the game is worth risking the new game price. Also, it gives them more freedom to sell if they didn't like it. The digital platform is about locking the user in no matter what. No chargebacks, no ownership, etc. Do a charge back Sony bans your console and locks you out of the games you "purchased". End of.
    - hobs 6y ago
      The middlemen are just as bad, they'll buy a game for a dollar and turn around and sell it for 20, so I dont really care either way - steam sales are saving me me much more than resales ever paid me back.
      - freeone3000 6y ago
        Except you can get a refund for a game from GameStop without being banned. You can sell it back for some, non-zero amount of money. If you don't like their price, you can try selling it yourself. That's a huge swath of ownership rights given up for a 15% discount.
arbitrage 6y ago
I mean, yeah? That's how the first sale doctrine works? If you don't want people to resell your game, then make a shittier game. Or something. I'm not really sure what it is you're actually complaining about.
boh 6y ago
Aren't we lucky the industry "solved" the problem of consumer ownership rights by removing them completely. I'm glad "developers" (i.e. large corporate entities that are mostly profiting from these sales) are benefiting from this arrangement rather than the majority of the gaming community (consumers).
knodi123 6y ago
Most people don't realize this, but libraries are actually very bad for writers. Books are often lent out dozens of times, with no new revenue for the writers. Why is that bad? Writers need to make money on every single sale. If they can't, books will have to get longer and longer, to make it harder to finish reading them during a library checkout interval. A lot of those problems go away if you just buy everything you're going to read directly from the kindle store.
- TurkishPoptart 6y ago
  Perfect analogue here.
Tiktaalik 6y ago
It is not true that GameStop is bad for developers. The ability for gamers to sell games enables gamers to stretch their dollar further and to buy more games. In an environment where selling is not possible gamers lock their available dollars up with the top tier of expensive AAA games and there's less sales opportunity for the rest of the market.
Fezzik 6y ago
Seems like the goal should be to make games people want to replay for years instead if resell. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but I have dabbled on most platforms and all I still own are my NES, SNES, and N64... and all the games I ever bought for them, because from Metroid to Wave Runner to Ken Griffey Jr Baseball to any Zelda game they are a blast to replay solo or with friends. Nintendo seems to be able to develop games that resonate with people as opposed to being flashes in the pan.
nitwit005 6y ago
I suspect the people who bought the used copies before haven't become full priced customers. There are a lot of other free or cheap gaming options. Instead it's probably closer to a price bump for the people who did sell their games, as they can no longer do so.
CivBase 6y ago
Isn't this like arguing libraries are terrible for authors?
jliptzin 6y ago
What does that have to do with gamestop? Anyone is free to sell a physical game they no longer want, at gamestop, ebay, craigslist, directly to a friend, etc. Same thing with books.
- astura 6y ago
  In fact, this was exceeding common before gamestop even existed! Gamestop did not invent used game sales!! We didn't have gamespot in the SNES or NES era when I was a kid. My parents didn't have much extra money, nor did any of my friends parents and new games were absurdly expensive. In the life of my SNES my parents only purchase three games new, all JRPGs. Of my friends, most probably purchased less than that new. However, we'd be at one of the local second hand stores, swap meets, or pawn shops all the time to buy or sell games. We'd borrow and trade for each other's games. We played so many games without buying anything new. If anything I think gamestop actually decreased used game sales because they made used games more expensive, and new games are cheaper today (adjusted for inflation) and games in general are much higher quality and easier to vet if you'd like them before playing.

proverbialbunny 6y ago

Is that why games have gotten shorter? I'm from the NES - PS1 era of gaming where games would regularly take 60+ hours to play through. FFVII is still one of my all time favorites and is a good example of that. I think the first real fast game I played through was Metal Gear Solid. I'd rent, then buy if I liked it back then, and I played through all of Metal Gear Solid in something like 2 or 3 days. It was the first game I enjoyed that I did not buy, because I beat it while renting it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TylerE 6y ago
We're obviously remembering different NES games. The NES games I remember could generally be beaten in no more than an hour, if you knew how to actually do it without dying 1000 times. A good warpless speedrun time on Super Mario Brothers is about 19 minutes. If warps are allowed, it's under 5. Legend of Zelda? 27 minutes Ninja Gaiden? 12 minutes
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  It's a bit absurd going off of speed runs is a way to accurately identify a game's normal play length. I think all the games I had were 60+ hours, but I just liked JRPGs more than most genres. FFVIII was picked not only because it was one of my favorites (FF1 too, SMB3, ...), because the remake today has turned it into 3 games, and even then those 3 games seem long by today's standards.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    There's a bit of difference between an NES and as PSX, which came out a full 2 generations and 12 years later. The NES didn't have any way of saving, for instance. The two have about much in common as a PSX and an Xbox1.
    - proverbialbunny 6y ago
      Most NES games had a way of saving, except the earliest NES games. Most of them had codes you'd type in that was a save point. Many had actual save states on the cartridge. The earlier games got around not having a code by having a secret early on the game that was revealed later on in the game so you could skip all of the parts you previously played.
      - TylerE 6y ago
        I wouldn't consider codes a save. They often loss state. Basically just an encoding of "start at level X with Y lives". Maybe not even lives. There were only 54 NES releases with actual, battery based saves, out of 716 officially released and licensed titles (and heaven knows how many bootlegs). So, "most" is an overbid.
        proverbialbunny 6y ago
        Well, most of the ones I wanted to play at least. ^_^
    - 6y ago
robrtsql 6y ago
It seems to me that you're mostly talking about RPGs. I can't think of any NES-PS1 platforming/shooter/action games that had 60 hours worth of content. If you look at today's RPGs, they're still _really long_. It is expected that most players who play Persona 5 Royal will take over 100 hours to complete it, which is pretty wild considering it's not a 'grinding game'--players aren't taking that long because they're fighting the same enemies repeatedly hoping for a rare item to appear. There really is 100 hours' worth of contents.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  FFVII was used as an example because the re-release is 3 games, and each game is considered long for today's standards.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    They're adding a ton of content, though.
decafninja 6y ago
When console games started selling for $59.99 (or more), I found it difficult to justify purchasing most single player games unless they really were jaw-droppingly amazing because the hours to dollars ratio started becoming very low. Meanwhile a multiplayer game - whether it be a MMORPG or a FPS, would net you countless hours of entertainment.
- kod 6y ago
  > When console games started selling for $59.99 (or more) So last century? Big single player 16 bit games were $80usd (e.g. Phantasy Star II) and $59.99 was not unusual for run of the mill licensed or sports games. https://i.redd.it/ikerxbqipf821.jpg https://i.redd.it/ikerxbqipf821.jpg It's amazing that 59.99 survived as a standard price for games as long as it did.
  - dx87 6y ago
    People look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them 59.99 for a game is a bargain compared to the amount of value you get with modern titles. I remember buying Nintendo and Sega games for the same price. Magazines only covered the biggest games, so the most informed you could be as a consumer is based on how cool the box art was, and most could be finished in an afternoon once you figured out the cheap mechanics designed to force you to start over.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  > Meanwhile a multiplayer game - whether it be a MMORPG or a FPS, would net you countless hours of entertainment. Not always. Consider that there are now so many the pool of potential co-players is spread among many. And servers don't stay up forever. As a patient gamer I usually miss the first wave. Then you're at a big disadvantage in skill or level. And frankly there are so many jerks online that I prefer single player even if it means moving on to other games more often.
pfranz 6y ago
I think there's a bit of bias in the games you played. There have been externalities affecting game design since the NES. Early NES games were modeled (or ported) after arcades, which incentivized you to put in a quarter, play a handful of minutes, then put in a quarter to continue. This didn't translated well at home. So game designs moved away from that format. When movie rental places started offering games (late NES early SNES days) they started making games take longer than a rental period to beat (2-3 days). One well known example is the monkey puzzle in the Lion King game [1]. I distinctly remember renting NES games and beating them in a few days before returning them. Specifically, one of the later Mega Man games. Granted, I owned other Mega Man games so I was familiar with the format. I still would have loved to play that game over and over, but I only rarely was able to buy games. [1] https://www.thegamer.com/lion-king-remaster-monkey-level-controversy/ https://www.thegamer.com/lion-king-remaster-monkey-level-con...

iNerdier 6y ago

You say this as if people shouldn’t be able to resell information, as packaged in a disc. Does this extend to other things, would you want to prohibit used book sales for example, or cars from being resold? The ability to resell books didn’t lead to only works the size of war and peace being sold...

whynotminot 6y ago
Not really comparable. For example, the cost to produce a major book release does not scale nearly as quickly as the cost of producing a modern AAA video game.
- jasonpeacock 6y ago
  There is a massive secondary market for cars, and those costs scale much higher than producing a AAA video game, but you don't see car manufacturers blaming used car lots? Perhaps the game's price should reflect the cost of production, or they should limit the cost of production to what's sustainable by sales.
  - whynotminot 6y ago
    Also an entirely different industry, with entirely different costs, constraints, and production practices. Can we stop using oranges as we talk about apples? While we're here though, actually, yes, car manufacturers would love it if people would stop buying used cars. In fact, there were whole lawsuits in the past about planned obsolescence, and dealers today often run promotions to get you to turn in your used "clunker" and buy a new ride.
    - georgeecollins 6y ago
      And also, what do you think warranties, dealer repair shops , and certified pre-owned cares are about? They are trying to take a cut of that business? If we could sell our games as a "certified pre-owned" DVD then it would have made a lot more sense to make a short, tight little single player game.

oh_sigh 6y ago

Same problem with libraries in my opinion.

georgeecollins 6y ago
I am not making a moral judgement, I am saying that the shape of the business affects the quality and the style of the art. Movie theaters are dying and it seems like they may be replaced by streaming services like Netflix. The truth is, for all streamers pay they probably won't end up paying as much as theaters. And it is not clear any of them currently make money. What if the model that really makes money is YouTube, and a lot of classic expensive movies are going to be replaced with mediocre user generated content that is extremely profitable to stream? That may sound crazy, but think what happened to radio? I am not seriously arguing that I know what will happen, but you just have to understand that when there is a good buisiness for high quality, you tend to get quality.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > The truth is, for all streamers pay they probably won't end up paying as much as theaters. I feel like your average $200M movie could be made for $100M and not be harmed all that much. > What if the model that really makes money is YouTube, and a lot of classic expensive movies are going to be replaced with mediocre user generated content that is extremely profitable to stream? Then tons of money will flow into creating youtube content, and competition will provide a bounty of high quality content. > That may sound crazy, but think what happened to radio? This is a good example of how things shouldn't be mediocre. TV shows aren't lower quality than radio shows, once they got some momentum going.

toast0 6y ago

> Most people don't realize this but GameStop was actually very bad for console game developers. Games were often resold, with each time no revenue going to the developer. I worked on a popular Xbox / PS3 game that was resold like 7-9 times on average. Our marketing people figured that GameStop made a lot more money on the game than the developer. I'm more willing to pay $X for a game if I know I can probably sell it for $Y when I don't want it anymore. Digital store games don't have the same value for me, I can't sell the games later, and depending on the system, might have a big hassle transferring them to a different system if/when the one I have goes south. Book publishers (and authors) don't get anything when I buy from a used bookstore, or borrow a book from a friend either. Neither does a cookware manufacturer get anything if I buy used pots and pans from a thrift shop.

georgeecollins 6y ago
Right, but in that model you got a couple dollars, game stop gets like 5x and the developer loses a sale that would be 10-20x. Books cost tens of thousands of dollars to make and games cost tens of millions. There would be no video game business like the one we know if they were sold the same way as books. Think about it a second-- your PlayStation game is sold on a piece of media that is proprietary. Are your books sold on proprietary paper made specially difficult to copy?
- toast0 6y ago
  Gamestop certainly wouldn't pay enough for me to sell to them; I'd rather sell or give to a friend, or sell on a marketplace for somewhere between Gamestop's buy and sell prices. Most of the independent used game shops have tighter spreads as well. This past year, I bought Animal Crossing for the Switch; even though I was pretty sure I wouldn't like it. As expected, I didn't like it, but I had a friend who wanted it, and I could mail it to them. That's a "lost sale" in video game accounting; but if it was tied to my switch, I would have never bought it, and my friend wasn't planning to buy it, but is thrilled to have it. A book doesn't need to be intentionally made difficult to copy, because in its natural form, it's a lot of effort to copy. There's not enough money to be saved by copying a book to make it worthwhile, except for maybe textbooks. Arcade manufacturers don't get a cut of the quarters put into a machine either (well, maybe they do for some of the games that now need an online connection to run).

grillvogel 6y ago

used game sales (as well as used sales of all other media) have always existed. this was not a cause of any problem for console game developers until around 2005 or so. the mid 2000s switch to the "next gen" platforms caused a lot of shittiness for gaming. mostly from publisher greed due to the potential for mass profits, and the increased cost of developing at higher fidelity. games were originally for a more niche audience, used to focus more on difficulty over "content" in order to get replay value and lifespan. but if you lower the difficulty you can hopefully get more players experiencing all of your "content", and hopefully you can get them to buy some more after they complete the main part of your game.

monksy 6y ago

> Most people don't realize this but GameStop was actually very bad for console game developers. And I feel 0 empathy for you. With the digital platform you are stripping away ownership rights from the purchaser. From your statement I feel that you're whining about missing sales that you never could have actually had. Do the 7-9 extra sales translate to 7-9x more sales on digital platforms? No.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ABeeSea 6y ago
This argument is misleading because even if it’s not the full 7-9, it is certainly greater than 0. We can argue what the exact percentage is, but saying there was 0 lost sales is just as wrong as saying 7-9 lost sales.
- monksy 6y ago
  It is slightly more, yes. However, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that it's as significant as they claim. The people buying used games don't feel that the game is worth risking the new game price. Also, it gives them more freedom to sell if they didn't like it. The digital platform is about locking the user in no matter what. No chargebacks, no ownership, etc. Do a charge back Sony bans your console and locks you out of the games you "purchased". End of.
  - hobs 6y ago
    The middlemen are just as bad, they'll buy a game for a dollar and turn around and sell it for 20, so I dont really care either way - steam sales are saving me me much more than resales ever paid me back.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Except you can get a refund for a game from GameStop without being banned. You can sell it back for some, non-zero amount of money. If you don't like their price, you can try selling it yourself. That's a huge swath of ownership rights given up for a 15% discount.

arbitrage 6y ago

I mean, yeah? That's how the first sale doctrine works? If you don't want people to resell your game, then make a shittier game. Or something. I'm not really sure what it is you're actually complaining about.

boh 6y ago

Aren't we lucky the industry "solved" the problem of consumer ownership rights by removing them completely. I'm glad "developers" (i.e. large corporate entities that are mostly profiting from these sales) are benefiting from this arrangement rather than the majority of the gaming community (consumers).

knodi123 6y ago

Most people don't realize this, but libraries are actually very bad for writers. Books are often lent out dozens of times, with no new revenue for the writers. Why is that bad? Writers need to make money on every single sale. If they can't, books will have to get longer and longer, to make it harder to finish reading them during a library checkout interval. A lot of those problems go away if you just buy everything you're going to read directly from the kindle store.

TurkishPoptart 6y ago
Perfect analogue here.

Tiktaalik 6y ago

It is not true that GameStop is bad for developers. The ability for gamers to sell games enables gamers to stretch their dollar further and to buy more games. In an environment where selling is not possible gamers lock their available dollars up with the top tier of expensive AAA games and there's less sales opportunity for the rest of the market.

Fezzik 6y ago

Seems like the goal should be to make games people want to replay for years instead if resell. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but I have dabbled on most platforms and all I still own are my NES, SNES, and N64... and all the games I ever bought for them, because from Metroid to Wave Runner to Ken Griffey Jr Baseball to any Zelda game they are a blast to replay solo or with friends. Nintendo seems to be able to develop games that resonate with people as opposed to being flashes in the pan.

nitwit005 6y ago

I suspect the people who bought the used copies before haven't become full priced customers. There are a lot of other free or cheap gaming options. Instead it's probably closer to a price bump for the people who did sell their games, as they can no longer do so.

CivBase 6y ago

Isn't this like arguing libraries are terrible for authors?

jliptzin 6y ago

What does that have to do with gamestop? Anyone is free to sell a physical game they no longer want, at gamestop, ebay, craigslist, directly to a friend, etc. Same thing with books.

astura 6y ago
In fact, this was exceeding common before gamestop even existed! Gamestop did not invent used game sales!! We didn't have gamespot in the SNES or NES era when I was a kid. My parents didn't have much extra money, nor did any of my friends parents and new games were absurdly expensive. In the life of my SNES my parents only purchase three games new, all JRPGs. Of my friends, most probably purchased less than that new. However, we'd be at one of the local second hand stores, swap meets, or pawn shops all the time to buy or sell games. We'd borrow and trade for each other's games. We played so many games without buying anything new. If anything I think gamestop actually decreased used game sales because they made used games more expensive, and new games are cheaper today (adjusted for inflation) and games in general are much higher quality and easier to vet if you'd like them before playing.