I went against my own judgement and watched Total Biscuit youtube reply. He had some actual good points of relevancy, but when he brought up the music industry I stopped listening because he has no clue.
Does everyone here remember the whole music industry debacle. They increased prices to 19.99 or higher for a CD album. Then put restrictions on the cd to what and where you could play it. This was to battle piracy, and ITUNES. Apple took a huge cut of the pie before there was competition with amazon, spotify ect. People, should I say fans put their wallets where their mouths were and didn't buy CD's. They bought tickets to the shows, which is where most of the money for performers goes.
After the dust settled, we now have brand new CD albums with unreleased tracks, Bonus tracks and dvd's that are 9.99 to 11.99 when they come out.
Because of more competition for digital, amazon had cheap cd prices, and cheaper digital album prices, everyone jumped on it. Now the consumer is buying music again instead of downloading it, I mean there's still tons of people downloading music. But there are also more people buying it, because of digital sales, why even pay 12 bucks for a CD, when I pay 7 for it digitally and can stream it to anything.
If Total Biscuit think's second hand games is what's killing the developers and publishers he's wrong.
On a side note, where does he think these used copies come from? New game sales, and also he didn't mention other streams of revenue for games like he did for CD's and movies. We now have DLC, add ons, season passes, expansion packs, there are other forms of revenue for games out there. If someone buy's a multiplayer game thats 2 years old, but people still play it, is he going to buy all the map packs that people are using now?
Most probably yes, because he bought that old game second hand, which by then the money was made off of that game. He now has more money to spend on add on, DLC, expansions.
Total Biscuit fails to see this.
I am against the way gamestop pushes used games especially if the title is fairly new. But first of all why is gamestop getting copies of a new game traded in so early? It;s because A) it wasn't a good game, B) was a short game and had no replay value, C) there's no one playing online which goes with A.
Customer's shouldn't have to pay for developer's and publisher's not doing their part. It's the developer's job to make a great game with great features and replay value. That replay value could be in the form of mechanics. The witcher 2 had multiple endings and scenario's, Devl May cry has different difficulties, moves to master and bloody palace mode. Dead space 2 has new game plus, Resident evil 4 had new game plus, also Ada Wong missions, and mercenary mode.
If a game like heavenly sword had more to it than pretty animations and graphics, it wouldn't had been traded in so much. The same goes with the first uncharted, even though I replayed that at least three times, but that's just me.
It's also the publisher's job to promote the game correctly and not project unrealistic sales number's for an unproven game. The whole Square-Enix Tomb Raider sales debacle is nutt's, they wanted 6 million? That's stupid, that game did close to 4 million which is great.
The same can go for how the game is created. Developer's don't need overblown 100 million dollar budgets, they don't need 200 plus people working on a game. There are smaller developer's out there doing it with a third of the people, and producing Triple A quality titles.
It's not the gamer/consumer's fault developer's and publisher's don't use what's available for developing tools and Software, they don't need to create a new engine for their game if they used a previous proven one before hand.
The customer and gamer, are paying out the ass each new generation, well this generation at least. Look at pc, so many budget games, because they have smaller teams, use tools that are either free, or cheap, use proven technology.
It's not our fault they don't work smarter, if they had less shit games, and games that felt more complete when they shipped like last generation. Then there wouldn't be an issue with the market.
