PS4 Not Playing Used Games, What Is This Hobby Coming To?

[Bojay1997]

It's not simply creating a great product. If other things are really eating into their profits, the onus is on them to do something about it. Adapt or die. I remain skeptical of this supposed crisis, however.

Like I said, used sales have been around a long time, so how come it's only suddenly a huge problem for the industry as of a couple years ago? Piracy has always been a problem, though I'm not sure how much of a "problem" it really is. It's pretty hard to pirate PS3 games, isn't it? Yet that doesn't seem to result in proportionally better game sales compared to other platforms. By contrast, PSX games were super easy to pirate. And renting? That's gone down, if anything.

Everyone's an amateur industry analyst these days. I refuse to join the chorus of crocodile tears over those poor, defenseless game corporations losing profits to big mean Gamestop. I'm not Gamestop's biggest fan, but Gamestop didn't put THQ out of business.

If they get rid of used games, they've lost my business. Period. If you (general you, not you, personally) genuinely don't mind, that's cool. But apologism over it, and scapegoating Gamestop in the process, is ludicrous. When the game industry considers going in that direction, they will have to consider the balance between any recovered profits and the loss in profits from losing the business of people like me. If the former outweighs the latter, I will certainly not like it, but so be it.

Actually, considering inflation, games are cheaper than they were a decade ago even at full MSRP. A $50 game in 2003 is the equivalent of a little over $62 in 2013 dollars. Games are much cheaper than they were in the 1980s and 90s where I can recall spending $50-$60 for NES and SNES games. That's over $100 in today's dollars. People just are looking to always get things cheaper. There's nothing wrong with that, but it largely killed the music business and turned touring into the only real viable source of revenue for recording artists and so now you have outrageously priced tickets for concerts in many cities.

I don't agree that this is all some industry spin to justify higher prices, DLC and online passes. I've actually looked at the annual reports for a number of video game publishers and developers and the numbers aren't pretty. Programmers and other talented people make a lot more proportionally than they did 20 years ago because there is so much more demand for their skills in other industries. Similarly, game companies and studios tend to be located in technology hubs like California where real estate, utilities, taxes and overhead are much higher than other places. Cost of living is higher too resulting in higher wages. I suppose they could start outsourcing more to other countries (I realize some publishers already do this) just like the hardware manufacturers do, but software has always been a very strong American business and I'd personally like to keep it that way.

Used game sales aren't new, but the scale at which they have been expanded is something fairly recent. Gamestop didn't engage in major expansion until the past decade including a merger with EB and in the past three years, they have been particularly aggressive about adding new locations. It's similar to the rapid expansion of Starbucks that not only killed many small coffee chains and shops, but also drove coffee sales to record levels as the convenience of having a gourmet coffee shop on every corner got more people into the habit of buying $4 coffee every day. I'm frankly amazed at how often I hear co-workers and friends talk about buying and trading in used games to Gamestop, many of whom would never have bought used a few years ago simply because before Gamestop they didn't have an easy way of doing so outside of maybe Ebay and to a lesser extent, video rental chains like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video.

I agree that Gamestop shouldn't be faulted for pursuing a lucrative business model just like Apple shouldn't be faulted for the fact that single song downloads have replaced whole album sales. That doesn't change the fact that the very existence and success of Gamestop's business model is significantly impacting the bottom line of publishers and developers.