3 ms·
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
by 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 agoGamestop 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).