Braben: pre-owned is "damaging" market Comments by Robert Purchese

MrChuckles
"(not pointing at davc4 btw, you have reasoned arguements, just not quite right ;-))"

I think we can agree to disagree on this one,
I have no problem with 2nd hand money going to developers, i have no porblem with more money going to developers. I believe that prices are way to high for games especially now as food etc. gets more expensive and a price drop would mean greater sales and lead to greater profits.
I also believe that cheaper prices would lower (not eradicate) the demand for 2nd hand games thus again leading to greater numbers of sales going to the dev teams etc.

I admit that i may be wrong but if you look at fairplay campaign from 2002 and the actual damage it caused the industry then you may see where i am coming from.

Oh and i hate it how people say David and make a scandous remark as it makes me feel bad.

Oh and i think ill stick to Hydrocarbon Counting Systems than making Fifa 09,
im sure i could possibly be the teaboy for that team ;-)

@lavalant:

>"I think they used piracy back then as one of their excuses of expensive games, now you're saying it's trade ins? "

I used to work in the industry back then - Games were pricey back then as the carts were expensive. But piracy/trade-ins.. same difference. Both stop the developer getting any money. In fact i'd say trade ins were worse as the gamer doesnt seem to REALISE that hurts the developers.. Whereas at least with piracy they understand what they're doing. The only difference is the retailer doesnt make a profit.


>"Games aren't priced correctly, a game like GTA4 = £40"


Games prices are pretty much fixed by the platform holder. A 40 quid game.. a vast majority of that price goes to sony/microsoft or nintendo.. Ever wondered why pc games are so much cheaper?

But regardless of which.

Games have a shelf life of a month - maybe two. BECAUSE of trade ins (why buy it new when i can get it for 5 quid less traded in). Of a game costs $50 million to make. And you need to sell say 1 million to break even. But you only have 20 million 360 owners out there.. So that means you need to sell to 1/20th of your userbase in less than a month.

.. Whereas the shops are laughing all the way to the bank after they've sold the same physical game four of five times for maximum profit (of which the developer sees none)


No-one is suggesting that people should stop selling their games second hand.

But you're suggesting that the developers dont deserve to make their money back on the game they've made? A game which you may love? How do you suggest that developer then can afford to go on and make more games like that? i.e. More games that you'd love to play?

If you were in business, and you were making top quality AAA titles which didnt make their money back thanks to the pre-owned market.. Would YOU keep developing risky $50 million dollar titles? Or would YOU yourself start making shitty casual games which sell just as well but are MILES cheaper to make? Think about it.. What would YOU do? Go out of business? Or chose to make a profit?

"
Ok, some people don't seem to get it...

NEW GAME: £49.99 split into:

Dev: £10 (covering dev costs)
Publisher: £10 (Profit covering risk of funding dev costs + advertising)
Manufacturing: £5
Distribution: £2
Tax: £7.50
Retail: £15 "


From my experience from years back.. it was more like:

NEW GAME: £49.99 split into:

Retail: £25
Platform Holder: £20
Dev, Publisher, Manufacturing, Distributing then distribute the rest..

@Smelly

but do we give a toss?

Games are expensive, we own them, we can sell them, just like cars..if they can make games that you want to keep owning, good on them, i don't want to get rid of half life 2, that's singleplayer

£40 is a lot for disposable media, they spend a shitload more on many films (up to £200+ million), and they're £16 or less....they have a cinema run (bring back arcades, devs didn't care when they killed them though did they), and more people see them, more people would buy games if they're cheaper, the industry just want to be skanks, and i'm glad we don't let them...show me a console which prevents second hand trade, and i won't buy it

At some point it will be HDD based consoles where you can't sell on what you've bought...and we'll tell our kids about the good old days when you bought something, then it was actually yours, to do what you like with, and they'll tell us how the subscription to play model is like a tax and how they can't afford to buy a house because they like games so much..

EA already con £40 off people with marketing, Mercs 2 is not worth £40quid, it feels Ok at the moment because you can make 1/2 back if you get duped into buying some crap that's not lived up to the unrealistic expectations and shrewed selling techinques of video game publishers..

EDF was priced just right, which is why i still own it, and it's SP only...i've always thought it's good to be able to sample the many joys gaming has to offer, but if they want to try and go niche whilst getting bigger let them, less players and more money is the way games companies will have it, and that will suck

Braben is pretty much a great person for UK developers, he has their interests at heart, however on this matter he does not have gamers interests at heart and doesn't seem to care about simply having lots of people have an anjoyable time with his games, if he doesn't coin the money off all of them...taking that attitude lends piracy a glamorous and noble image that it shouldn't have, and if my kids buy a HDD loaded with copied games i'll probably understand and let them play it, instead of some gaming tax where you pay your money and have precisely 0 to show for it at the end of the day....i work hard too, to expect that when i spend my money i gain something tangible in terms of value and resale, that's not an unreasnoable expectation

Geesus soo much ill informed fucking nonsense.

"YES Braben is suggesting we stop selling our games"

No he isnt


"he wants DRM in games so it only works on my console and means I cant sell it or lend it to a mate "

No he doesnt


"AAA titles will always make huge profits for companies"

Not always they dont. For every halo 3 there's 100's of pyschonauts and okami's.


>£40 is a lot for disposable media,

yes it is

>they spend a shitload more on many films (up to £200+ million), and they're £16 or less...

A *whole* 16 quid less? Wow. Nearly everyone watches movies... If i make a 360 game, my potential market is only 20 million people - not all of them will buy it (even something like halo 3 sold to less than 1/4 of the 360 owners.. I can bet 99% of 360 owners have owned a copy at one time or another though).

And Movies have sales/rentals/movies/tv/etc.. Games have a shelf life of a month.. movies have years.. Lowering the price on a huge budget game will NOT make the money back..

But yeah.. DVD rentals make a lot of money.. and this is what Braben is suggesting.. PROPER cheap rental units. He isnt telling everyone to stop selling their 2nd hand games like some morons (lavalant) say..


>bring back arcades, devs didn't care when they killed them though did they

No, the public killed arcades by stopping going.

In the same way as the public will probably kill "hard core" gaming then blame it on the devs (or nintendo)

"At some point it will be HDD based consoles where you can't sell on what you've bought...and we'll tell our kids about the good old days when you bought something, then it was actually yours,"


GAAAH!!! You REALLY are a fucking stupid fuckwit arent you?

NO-ONE is suggesting people shouldn't be allowed to sell their games second hand.

They're saying shops PROFITING from selling trade-ins and the industry seeing none of it, and the public not seeing much of a drop in price on said trade ins, and the fact you cant buy new games after a month in any shop THANKS to the trade-in system.. is a bad thing for EVERYONE.

"EA already con £40 off people with marketing, Mercs 2 is not worth £40quid, it feels Ok at the moment because you can make 1/2 back if you get duped into buying some crap"


If you buy a shit game because you didnt read reviews.. that's not the publishers fault.. that's YOUR fault.

But then gamers never seem to be able to take the blame for anything..

Not ALL games can be AAA games.. It doesnt work. If every game was worth 9/10.. then they'd have to move the scoring bar on how re rate games.. Because even if they were all ace.. some would STILL be acer than the others.. subsequently the ones which were ace but not as ace as the others would get 3/10.. or whatever.. Either way it'd balance itself out and subsequently it's impossible to have EVERY game be classified as great.

I know (judging by your posts) that you arent very smart.. so i know this will probably be a hard thing to grasp.. I'll let you think it through though.. dont hurt your head thinking too much about it though..

This is such a bullshit argument. The people that trade in their games are very likely to factor that into their buy decision. Without that possibility, fewer game sales, simple.

smelly is a smelly fool

Selling older games is how many people fund their purchases of new ones though. I used to keep all my collections, but hey things change and with money being in short supply I simply have to sell on finished or unplayed ones to buy new. Fuck me, we're not talking about pirates here.

The games industry will always have a ready reason why games simply have to be £40. If that's always going to be the case, then I'll have to sell my games on. If I can no longer do that, well, fuck it, I won't be buying games at all.

Another week, another whinging software developer. Here's a tip: make single-player campaigns with some replay value - then maybe they won't be so quick to hit the used market.

I have been hanging on for ages to wait for the price of CoD4 to drop to something reasonable, but it's one of the few games that has stayed pretty much at its full retail price, months after its initial release. In fact I only got lucky this week because Morrisons were selling it for £25 as part of their "1/2 price games for one week only" offer. This is clearly because people aren't letting go of their copies.

On the other hand, you have titles like Metal Gear Solid 4, which was discounted to £30 only 2 weeks after its release...

@arbiter: "Here's the problem: Games need to be expensive in order to cover costs throughout the chain from concept through development, publication, distribution and lastly, retail."

So why does a movie, that costs the same if not more than a game to make with just as large a crew(if not more) cost an average of about £15 on new release DVD (and let's say, another £6 per person box office sales), and there is no worry about second-hard market?

Movies are initially cheaper and their second-hand market doesn't hurt the studios....


..so why should games be different?

He's got a point. If Lost Winds came on CD he'd probably get a fraction of the sales because the game would be resold several times over with Game pocketing the difference.

So there are two ways around it; working with game stores or going digital.

I'd prefer the former. If it's the latter then second-hand market gets knocked on the head as well as the pre-owned market.

@Smelly

thanks for the name calling, very intelligent and grown up are you...

you don't seem to be understanding something rather obvious though...WHY SHOULD A RETAILER GIVE GAME DEVELOPERS A CUT OF SOMETHING THEY'VE NOT PURCHASED FROM THEM

utter fuckwit, with the cheek to have a go when he doesn't understand how capitalism works...how can i have a debate with you, you don't have an understanding of how trade works, ownership, anything...if i sold you a turkey will you want to cut Bernard Matthews in on the deal?

Braben ignores what others have pointed out here: The effective price of a game is what you pay minus what you get for it when you sell it on. (E.g. car journalists often focus on second-hand value because of this: A new car with a good second-hand value is a "better" buy than another at the same price but with a lower second-hand value. Same holds for every physical good out there.) This makes single-license products like MMOs relatively expensive since you cannot resell them.

And the industry will never go after the massive second-hand traders because they happen to also be the biggest retail chains. Braben can shake his tiny fist but he will cry "yes Master" at launch - unless he goes the license code route or something Steam-ish. As long as you are selling a physical product you have to expect second-hand sales, even if you try and trick people into thinking you are only selling a license. (Can I get a cost-of-shipping replacement for my PS3 game disk if it breaks? If I can, then and only then do I accept it was a license you sold to me.)

And can people please stop the abuse of math and language that is to claim that pirated or second-hand games represent a loss? If I buy a €40 game used for €30, the publisher does not find that their bank balance has dropped by €10! There is no loss, just absence of (potential) income.

Sometimes second-hand is the only way to get something that is "out of print" or which sells out rapidly; unless we want to amend copyright law to add copyduty so that a customer can demand a copy from the publisher (maybe a print-on-demand like solution, should not be too difficult.)

"Here's a tip: make single-player campaigns with some replay value - then maybe they won't be so quick to hit the used market."

Come on, how many gamers (the non-casuals at least) care for replayability of a game? Most games we don't finish and when we do rush through a game we can't wait to play the next title that has been gathering dust for months on our shelves...

@BillyBrush:

"you don't seem to be understanding something rather obvious though...WHY SHOULD A RETAILER GIVE GAME DEVELOPERS A CUT OF SOMETHING THEY'VE NOT PURCHASED FROM THEM "


Okay.. Where as you (like most people) are moaning about the PRICE of the games.. a VAST majority of a games price when you buy it new goes to the retailer.. When you buy a used game from the retailer pretty much 90% of the price goes to them.

But yet THEY arent lowering prices are they? Hell, they dont even sell you a 2nd hand game at a decent price (usually knocking off 5 quid tops). Despite the fact they take shit loads of money at BOTH levels, do they give discounts BACK to the consumer?

Do they fuck.

A retailer probably can make up to (or even more than) 200 quid off a sale (and resell) of a single physical decent game..

Has it ever occured to you that THEY subsequently could be lowering prices? Or indeed lowering the prices of the resells (which I consider to be absolute fleecing).



"Sometimes second-hand is the only way to get something that is "out of print" or which sells out rapid"

GAWD! Has it occured to you the REASON the shelf life of a game is so short is BECAUSE of the 2nd hand market?


On all levels GAMERS are getting SCREWED by the RETAILERS.. But yet you guys are actually sticking up for them and slagging off one of the people who MAKE the games for you.

Games can exist without retailers.. They cant exist without the people who actually make the fucking things.

As for it "not harming the industry" Bullshit. Its already happened! Why else do you think we have so many carbon-copy "gauranteed seller" fps games? Why else do you think everyone is jumping on the casual bandwaggon? It's become WAAY to risky to make games - subsequently next to no-one is taking risks..

Im talking to a brick wall here arent i?

"WHY SHOULD A RETAILER GIVE GAME DEVELOPERS A CUT OF SOMETHING THEY'VE NOT PURCHASED FROM THEM "


.. If thats the case.. why should the developers sell their games to retailers in the first place at all? Why not sell them online with decent DRM and take the retailer out the picture?

If that happens - it'll be the retailers to blame..

@Smelly

retailers have shop rent, it's competetive, and online ones certainly don't make a profit margin that's that high...they buy them off the official distributors probably either Gem or EUK, or Andromeda, for around £23.99 a pop

If retailers make shedloads of money, other retailers can come along and discount them offering us a better deal...that's how competition works, Tesco et al are involved, plenty of people out there who can compete and make margins small.

You are not talking to a brick wall but i think you are not making a good argument at all for getting games publishers or devs into the profits of the second hand market...it's a transaction between the individual and a retailer, the publishers have no part in that, and i don't see that you've made any good reason why they should be in on that transaction....this does result in someone playing a game and 0 going to publisher or dev sure, that's pretty easy to work out....but why should they get in on a transaction between me, the owner of the disc, and the shop? if you can answer that you'll be knocking my argument down....even if it's something that is illegal and UK trade and customs wouldn't accept why not try? there's a question there i've posed, and you've not shot it down, shoot it down.

@Smelly

and re the last post pls refer to the initial comment i made about games being all downloaded to HDD in future...that is what they'll do...i won't like it, sounds like you will

Wow missed this article!

I knew it wouldn't be long before they go after 2nd hand games. I'll tell you this without 2nd hand gaming I wouldn't play half the games I do.

Your games are too expensive games industry I've been paying you so much money over the years month after month, just like DVD/Blu-Ray movies I can't AFFORD to buy it ALL 1st hand (or at all some of the time, even with the 2nd hand market) money doesn't just appear in the consumers wallet you know. Everyone involved from devs to retail needs to rethink the way they sell games to compete with 2nd hand gaming (and piracy)

Not just the download route though PLEASE! I like boxes!

"but why should they get in on a transaction between me, the owner of the disc, and the shop?"

You're exactly that: the owner of the disc. You own the 25 grams of polycarbonates, nothing more. In particular, not the game code and media! You're just a licensee, and if that license were to be non-transferable, or if it included a term which states that in case of resale, a share would have to be paid to the developer, there's nothing you could do about it. It would be perfectly legal - and, in my opinion, ethical as well. If someone enjoys playing a game, then compensation should go to its creator.

I buy an absolute shit load of pre-owned games these days, but to be fair they're all £3 games off eBay which are either hard-ish to find or still stupidly expensive in shops.

"If someone enjoys playing a game, then compensation should go to its creator."

Bull crap! They get paid to make it that is all, bollocks to this royalty crap (as much as I enjoy gaming) like everyone else they are paid to do a job. Like it or not people have the right to sell their goods on and people have the right to buy those goods.


Does Ferrari get a share if someone sells his car........

Don't know if anybody has already made these points but...

1. If the pre-owned market was somehow killed, people would just ebay their stuff anyway.
2. When so many good games come out at any one time, if you can't afford them all and then they go out of print, what would that mean? "Oh, sorry, you'll never be able to buy that game because you didn't get it when it was in print and now that pre-owned is dead, you can never get it". A little extreme but it could happen.

It is as much my capitalist right to sell my goods for cash to who I god dam please just as much as it’s the publishers, developers and retailers right! You don’t like it, go and live in North Korea!

Most reasonable people here aren't suggesting that pre-owned be killed entirely. Options could be a time-limit, which permits pre-owned sales only after, say, a year from launch. Or a "license transfer fee", so that the studios get a fair share from 2nd hand sales. Or perhaps killing the commercial pre-owned market, leaving private trade such as eBay intact.

Oh, and car analogies suck. Ferrari don't license their cars to you, they actually *sell* it. Ferrari also don't sell 90% of a particular model within 2 months of the product launch, while competing with itself on the pre-owned market. It's a completely different matter.

"like everyone else they are paid to do a job"
And where do you think their wages come from? Like most companies, game studios start with a debt/external financing from a publisher. They have to recoup on that. Through retail sales.

"It is as much my capitalist right to sell my goods for cash to who I god dam please just as much as it’s the publishers, developers and retailers right! You don’t like it, go and live in North Korea!"

An important aspect of capitalist society is the freedom of contract. If a publisher were to sell a game under the contractual condition that it can't be re-sold, it would be entirely within his rights.

If you don't like the terms of a contract associated with a sale, well, your only option is not to buy.

@smelly

"So back to your point:
"Not if the guy who buys 2nd hand games just pirated them instead, which is what you were suggesting. "

Either way, buying 2nd hand, pirating - the developer doesnt see any money."

Except for the money that he got from the original sale, which might not have happened if there was no 2nd hand market.

My point is that if everybody who bought 2nd hand games pirated them instead, sales of original games would go down. The existence of the 2nd hand market means that people buy new games that they otherwise wouldn't.

FWIW, I hate the way Game and the like deal with 2nd hand games. I'm a developer myself, so would much rather people bought new games. But I don't think that 2nd hand==piracy is a useful argument, as they're not equivalent. The relationship between 2nd hand and new sales is more complex than that.

I think its been pointed out a few times aldready - But DVD's, CD, Books, etc.. all other forms of entertainment media have a huge second hand market place live and kicking - No-one complains about these...

As for the shelf-life of games, I can still pickup Sam&Max (from 1993), Diablo2 (from, what 1998?) from GAME - These titles are obviously still selling or they wouldnt keep packaging them (though obviously becasue f piracy noone has been making any money from Sam & Max for the past 15 years). The easy solution is one Sony hit on a long time ago - A year or two after the inital release, repackage and resell the games at a budget price.

It seems to be a problem with the greed of publishers accompanied with an underdeveloped business model for entertainment software.

I think the we're having this argument because some people believe pre-owned is the same as second-hand. I don't think this is the case as pre-owned games are sold in the same place and at almost the same price as new games and if the shop has enough pre-owned stock they don't order in more new games.

Then there are those shop-run clubs which mean that the shop doesn't pay you for your games which you sell back to the shop, you get points which allow you to get some a game sometime in the future (but you still have to pay something for them). So the shop's raking even more in.

If anything, if pre-owned didn't exist then second-hand games (e.g. on eBay) could probably rise in price.

@ karstux

In reference to your previous posting on the ownership of the licence.

If a game developer chooses to load on terms such as limited resale permissions, that's an onerous term and as such should be communicated to the consumer at the point of sale. If it isn't, then the term isn't (technically) enforceable.

They need to communicate this as it is likely to influence the buyer's decision.

What do consumers therefore buy? The game with no resale limitations or the one with restrictions in place. Hard choice?

I agree that if developers are underfunded then they should receive more monies, but it should only be something like £2.00 as any more than this -reasonable- amount were to be charged then the cost of second hand games would have to rocket.

Not everyone has the ability to buy games at full price when they're released (mortgages and children do cost...), so trading is an enticing option for me.

“Like most companies, game studios start with a debt/external financing from a publisher.”

And I could say the same for most consumers today: Like most people, I start with a debt from my bank!

I could actually see the devs/pubs being able to make a chunk of profit from 2nd hand sales via the retailer.
If the Devs and the retailer sign into an agreement that say 1% of profits from the resale of games goes back to the developer then they can resell the games, this puts none of the burden on the consumer except possibly increased prices to the preowned titles as the retailer tries to claw back some profits.

But as i have said before and what some people are disputing is that it is the price of games that has caused the 2nd hand market to be as big as it is and it is not the other way around.

And in saying this what is the publishers dont seem to care about reselling games at a lower price anymore, i remember back when i was a teenager i sed to be able to pick up compliation packs of slightly older games. Nothing like this seems to go on anymore especially for the consoles.

And in saying this what is the publishers dont seem to care about reselling games at a lower price anymore, i remember back when i was a teenager i sed to be able to pick up compliation packs of slightly older games. Nothing like this seems to go on anymore especially for the consoles.

The shops aren't going to get them in stock, they can make more money out of pre-owned.

I think its been pointed out a few times aldready - But DVD's, CD, Books, etc.. all other forms of entertainment media have a huge second hand market place live and kicking - No-one complains about these...

Books, CDs, DVDs etc are very different markets, for reasons which have already been explained, sometimes quite well, earlier. While it is tempting to compare them as they are fellow mediums, the markets are quite different.

@Shinji - sorry very late with this reply

Actually all art sold at auction now has to pay a percentage back to the original artist. This has been the case for over two and a half years in the UK and a lot longer in some European countries like France - since about 1920 in fact:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resale_right

Also show me a British city apart from London or Hay on Wye which has more than 5 second-hand bookshops - and specialist shops selling very old books don't count because we're talking last month's bestsellers here aren't we? Certainly you don't go into Waterstones and see a whole shelf full of pre-owned books for half the price of the new version - and yet on the same street there will probably be two branches of Game with shelves full of pre-owned games.

The games industry is different so you shouldn't pull parallels like that in the first place - especially when your parallels are wrong. The most directly comparable industry, the movie industry, certainly doesn't put up with shops full of second hand DVDs. No-one will be benefitted if the games industry gets equally heavy handed so the retailers should start thinking about voluntary ways to address this problem.

@amcd28

"If a game developer chooses to load on terms such as limited resale permissions, that's an onerous term and as such should be communicated to the consumer at the point of sale. If it isn't, then the term isn't (technically) enforceable."

That is certainly true. The same should hold for the entire EULA. Most times, the customer doesn't really know what he's agreeing to when buying the game or clicking the "I Accept" button during install.

However, I'd much rather have a term in the EULA that forbids me to re-sell than an overzealous technical DRM measure (Bioshock, Mass Effect, Spore...) doing the same! And I have the feeling that we're going to get one or the other.

@ karstux

Mobile phone contracts forbid resale until the total amount payable is due. That's unfortunately not practicable in the games industry unless we rent our games for £3.00 a month for 12 months!

OR/ Would a terminating end user contract be the answer, in that after 2 years the DRM locking expires, because the game's essentially worthless at that point?

I am of course musing as I know nothing of the world of business

/-)

"Well, seeing games development first hand it is a pisser when people spend three years working on a game and then all the proceeds are eaten up by a retail chain. "

Unfortunately the multiple-pimped business model from manufacturer>distro>retailer>Joe Public is still around for stuff that could be distributed and stored electronically.

The change will come but at the moment it's the distros and retailers who have the cash to 'influence' the likes of MS etc to not go full-on with electronic distribution.

It will change in time but (like oil/new sources of energy) only when the same people who currently have the money/power are in a position to keep their money/power come the changeover ...

Unless someone comes along with enough (MAJOR) clout to take the pimps outta the chain and sort the distro/selling themselves Steam stylee.

Of course, when it does happen, don't expect anything to be cheaper - in the USA maybe where there's something akin to a free market but fucking forget about it in Europe ...

Of course 2nd hand game trading is bad for distributors and developers, but I bet retail relies heavily on it due to the high margins they get.

Reduce the price of games to around £20 and more people will buy on impulse and collect rather than trade.
Also might dissuade some from piracy.

"And where do you think their wages come from? Like most companies, game studios start with a debt/external financing from a publisher. They have to recoup on that. Through retail sales."

Work in the industry karstux? ;)

Of course I know this but at the end of the day if they cannot make enough through sales they need to rethink what they are doing, PRICE being the first thing! Do you think people buy 2nd hand for any other reason than it's AFFORDABLE gaming?

Trying to stop a basic human right is not going to encourage retail sales and pay their wage is it? If I buy a book/record/CD/Video/DVD/BLu/Game I WILL sell it on if I want (just like I have ALWAYS done), it's my right.

Step on that (as well as my internet privacy!) and I walk away from this greedy whining games industry completely and give 'em no money at all (like I have with music), plain and simple. May be extreme buy I'm a man of principle, hell the movie industry NEARLY went off my money list to after the format wars farce!

Well said bad09. I'm sick of all these moaning people that work in 'the industry'. They need to wake the fuck up and start making attractive products at attractive prices. If they don't, well they'll only have themselves to blame when they have to take jobs at McDonalds.

I always buy secong hand/pre-owned. If I want to sell games on after I'm done with them, that's what I am going to do (and I will never buy games that have DRM. Ever.) The way I see it there are enough chumps who will pay full price for me to always find decent games second hand.

all idiots..

game has to give you a reason for not to resell it

period

DRM is shove it up your arse style

but replayability, fun and quality are valid and good reasons

electronic distribution without DRM is an average reason

Trying to stop a basic human right is not going to encourage retail sales and pay their wage is it? If I buy a book/record/CD/Video/DVD/BLu/Game I WILL sell it on if I want (just like I have ALWAYS done), it's my right.

True, but shops only have pre-owned section next to the brand-new section for one of things you mention (games) and may decide to stop getting new stock in if there's enough pre-owned stock there. Pre-owned is not like second-hand.

The pre-owned market has yielded exponential sales growth for retailers. I haven't got access to the figures, but I'd wager the margin on pre-owned games far outstrips that on new titles (hence their willingness to promote them).

Braben's comments are spot on. Oblivion & BioShock were both 10/10 titles for me, but the former got twenty time as many hours. The condensed nature of the FPS experience makes it no less valid, it's developers no less deserving of reward.

The PC model seems fairer - lower initial price but no chance of trade in. There's always BitTorrent but I choose to support that which I love.

Start paying yo way or get ready for a perpetuity of Wii-flavoured casual ass bullshit. Forever.

Part of the reason why developers can't make an attractive product at an attractive price is that retailers are sucking the blood out of the industry, ensuring that the most attractive way of playing games is one that sees a tiny proportion of the profits going to developers. I'm not happy about games being loaded with restrictions, but I think the potential benefits for that kind of system would far outweigh the inconveniences.

Unfortunately that's not the way it works. See Spore, loaded with restrictions on usage to the point you can't play it yourself, let alone sell it on after you've finished with it, and it's actually MORE expensive than any comparable game. If developers can give me something tangible in exchange for giving up these rights I'm happy about it. The Orange Box was an excellent example of this, but attacking the value of games from all angles doesn't help at all.

Here's an idea Braben, fucking make Elite 4!