Silicon Knights boss, Denis Dyack, claims that used game sales pose a major threat for the future of the gaming industry and he prefers digital distribution.
How many gamers have walked into a video game retail store and purchased a second hand copy of a game? The answer is likely to be quite a few. Yet, while it may be a great way to get great games for cheap, it also does a great deal of financial damage to the publishers and developers who make those very games.
Basically, many retailers have trade-in offers where gamers can exchange older games for new ones or store credit to be spent later. At the same time, those traded games are usually put back on the shelf and sold at a lower price becoming ‘second hand’ games.
The reason developers and publishers are concerned over this is because of the fact that the resale of the same copy of the game does not result in any additional revenue for them, but rather the money only circulates between the retailer and the consumer.
Quantic Dream, the developers behind the PlayStation 3 exclusive, Heavy Rain, claimed that they had lost over a $1-million in revenue due to their game selling extremely well in the second hand games market.
While multiplayer oriented games seem largely unaffected by the second hand gaming market, the single player games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Batman: Arkham City and Heavy Rain bear the brunt of it.
Denis Dyack also weighed in on the growing debate and added, “I would argue that used games actually increase the cost of games. There used to be something in games for 20 years called a tail.”
A tail was basically how long a game could continue to sell for and some games had ‘tails’ for over 10 years due to the fact that there were very few used games available on the market.
“Now there is no tail. Literally, you will get most of your sales within three months of launch, which created this really unhealthy extreme where you have to sell it really fast and then you have to do anything else to get money.”
Continued in http://www.senore.com/Second-hand-games-are-going-to-cannibalize-the-industry-2-a140589
Tags: