Yet another game dev jumps on the retarded "Used games are evil" bandwagon. *sigh*

[kane_magus]

This time, it's Quantic Dream, the creators of Heavy Rain.

"We basically sold to date approximately two million units, we know from the trophy system that probably more than three million people bought this game and played it," de Fondaumiere told GI.biz. "On my small level it's a million people playing my game without giving me one cent."

*shakes head*

Once again, with pretty much every single other product in the world that has a used market, I don't see the original creators pissing and moaning about lost sales. I have never understood and will never understand why video game creators in particular, apart from all others, feel like used products are especially hurting them or why they feel like they are somehow entitled to a cut of the sales of such. Especially since this is such a recent thing that has only come to the forefront in the past couple years or so, despite the fact that used game stores (and rentals and such) have been around pretty much for as long as there have been games.

Speaking of rentals, people in the comments (and, heck, the article itself) are going "But what about rentals and friends borrowing games and the like? Surely, it's not just used sales, right?" Um, it's been pretty clear for a while now that as far as many devs and pubs are concerned, all of those things (used sales, rentals, lending of a game between friends, etc.) are tantamount to piracy, and thus must be stamped out with extreme prejudice. With that mindset comes the advent of "new game codes" and "pre-order bonuses" and "online passes" and the like, things that you don't get if you buy used or as a rental or whatever. You know, parts of the game that they explicitly cut out of the final product and make you pay extra for if you miss out, for whatever reason. E.g. you pre-ordered from Amazon rather than from Gamestop, and thus you miss out on whatever part of the game they chopped out to be the Gamestop bonus. Heaven forbid you buy a game used these days, since you'll have to pay around a quarter to half of what you paid again to get the rest of the game you're otherwise missing out on because it got chopped out and included only in new copies.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I miss the old days when you just bought a game and that was it. You got the full game that you paid for, nothing more and nothing less (warts and all, as the case may have been). Nothing was cut out of the game to be sold back to you later for an additional price. No pre-order bonuses. No new game codes. No online passes. Hell, even the old days before DLC became all the rage were better, especially since a lot of DLC these days is not in the form of new stuff that is being made later on after the original game has been out for a while (ala expansion packs or whatever), but is instead stuff that is being blatantly removed from the original game for the sole purpose of being sold separately for an extra cost as DLC. Or even worse, it's stuff that's not actually cut from the original game at all and is still right there on the disc but is simply locked out until you pay for the code to unlock it.

"Now are games too expensive?" de Fondaumiere continued, "I've always said that games are probably too expensive so there's probably a right level here to find, and we need to discuss this altogether and try to find a way to I would say reconcile consumer expectations, retail expectations, but also the expectations of the publisher and the developers to make this business a worthwhile business."

This, on the other hand, I could agree with. Games are getting too expensive. It's pretty ridiculous when some games, especially if they are a "special" or "limited" or whatever version, cost almost as much as the frickin' console on which they're being played. Seriously, I've seen some "collector's edition" games cost $150 or more new. But even ignoring that, $60-$70 for even a "normal" new game is just ludicrous. This is part of the reason why I've started buying more and more Steam/GOG games, and just gravitating back to playing mostly PC games in general, since even retail versions of those are usually $10-$20 cheaper than their console counterparts, even for the exact same game. But then, PC games have their own set of issues, such as asinine "always online" DRM schemes and the like. *cough*Diablo3*cough*

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

"On my small level it's a million people playing my game without giving me one cent."

The "entitlement generation" is far more widespread than industry would like you to believe.