I was typing up some comment responses to my last post and realized I was writing a book, so I thought it best to FULL ENTRY this pig! Because it is a great discussion topic, and I'm not so bullish that I don't enjoy seeing the complete issue from other viewpoints. This isn't as if we want to argue about whether or not the Fatal Frame series is the single best horror game franchise ever made, where if you came at me with an opposing opinion I would immediately delete all comments and take out an ad in Variety calling you a Nazi neanderthal.
Paul says:
"I am baffled by the idea that trading in/selling games for store credit is a sign that we don't value our hobby and the public shouldn't either. People as a rule don't trade them in out of some secret shame about the hobby. They trade them in because they're done with them and can get money for them. Otherwise they stack up, gathering dust, when they could turn into a fraction of a new game they want. It's craven materialism that crosses all cultural boundaries, not some hidden hobby inferiority complex."
OK, yeah, I'm probably exaggerating. Maybe it's not so much a secret complex but that we're just all so damn cheap. I just think it's a shame that, thanks to the success of GameStop and similar, we're becoming enthusiasts that are defined by being cheap.
I don't see the same level of buy it/trade it/buy it in other hobbies. When you buy music or movies, your first thought isn't "I'll watch/listen to this once or twice and then flip it." We tend to keep that stuff. So why don't we keep video games? People who are big movie fans don't trade in movies, even as they gather dust. You've got your film freaks with old massive laser disc libraries on one end, and you have average families that only get around to offloading VHS movies at yard sales. And even then it's kid stuff that has been outgrown or when they move on to another format and have re-purchased the material in a new format. Imagine that, people re-buying entertainment media that they liked! We freak out when Nintendo re-releases an NES Mario collection and start screaming that they're just out to bleed us dry.
As Tony mentioned, I am a keeper. I'll be on Hoarders in twenty years and it will be the funniest damn episode you ever saw. Clark will be rummaging through old boxes and have to say stuff like "Really, Dad? Another mint-on-card 1994 Phoenix X-Men figure?" So I don't understand the mentality of constantly exchanging in stuff you claim to like, just for the sake of money.
Paul, I agree with your points about the good side of the used game market (and mirrored some in my post), but I think most people take it to an extent where it harms the people actually making the games. It even gets downright hostile. We tend to figure that the developer already gets enough money, so screw them. Meanwhile, dev houses are being shut down and people put out of work.
I know it's more complicated than that (can't blame terrible crunch conditions on the used market!), but I think we err on the side of being more or less okay with game developers getting next to nothing for their work. If GameStop's system kicked back some portion of used sales back to the publishers, wouldn't that be something!
In the end I'm not really concerned about making money back on my collection. I don't sell back my novels, my comics, my music, my toys, my TV/movies, my clothes, my furniture or anything else. So I don't see why video games have to have some massively widespread special system set up for it. If I want to offload old toys, my options are eBay and yard sales... I don't have KB Toys with some amazing Toy Buy Back program.
A Yahoo User (I have GOT to fix my commenting system, because that is screwy) says:
"What makes video games different than movies, music, and books - which have the same used markets? They are all forms of entertainment (video games are not a hobby for everyone who plays them) that some people keep and others dispose of when finished with them."
Movies/music/books do not have multiple global retail chains devoted to the trade-in-for-credit scenario, nor do they have the big box stores (like TRU) scrambling to add that to their business model. So I don't think other forms of entertainment have the same used markets. They have used markets, sure, but nothing like what goes on via GameStop. How much money does a local Paperback Trade make, and what impact does it have on the publishing industry? None.
OK, there's the rental business for movies/TV. $1 Redbox and Netflix and all that. I guess I don't see that as precisely comparable because that wing of entertainment is already so accepted and so genre-ized that people have already booked themselves into little fan-compartments. Then they buy and keep from that subset, and they rent from the wider universe.
Go to Borders and ask why they don't offer an in-house trading program. Go to a book publisher and suggest that they would grow the industry by allowing a BookStop to buy back recent releases and sell them again to different people with 0% going to them. They'd look at you like you're nuts. Somehow I doubt they're thrilled with the existence of sites like Bookmooch, where users trade books for no money at all. Where, effectively, you can buy keep trading and trading to get free reads for the rest of your life. If Bookmooch ever grows beyond a niche (and it won't because it's inconvenient; same with Goozex for gaming), you can bet somebody in publishing is going to take notice.
As for half.com, eBay and other secondary sources, I'm sure the content distributors would love to get a piece of that action. That's all Project Ten Dollar is anyway: a piece of the action. I know I'm veering toward sounding like I want all secondary markets eradicated, but, again, half.com doesn't define movie fandom (for example) in the way GameStop defines gaming fandom. It is the prevailing mindset that GameStop encourages that bothers me above all else - don't keep stuff, sell it back to us for a pittance so we can turn a profit - and the fact that a huge swath of self-identified gamers go for it. That's why I'm cool with the gamecos finding a way to recoup some money there... are they being assclowns about it? Probably.
I LOLed at your final comment:
"And what terrible punishment shall we drop on those who use a library?"
Libraries haven't been relevant to American society in decades. Not that they're a bad thing, just that only a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total audience use them. Particularly since the internet boom. If libraries were a monetary threat to the publishing industry, they would have been shut down already. The original historical point to a public library was to spread education/information/entertainment and conveniently smarten up the populace, not to just be a place for old people to read Harlequin Romance novels for free.
I know you guys are looking at me like I'm trying to absolve the publishers from all guilt, but I'm not trying to be that way. I know they screw us over, I know they screw over their employees. I know they'll take any steps they can to find new ways to screw us over so they can maximize profits. I know GameStop is a business and also works to maximize their profits. I know not every gamer can continue to afford brand new games all the time. I know this is a dangerous path and if we don't stay vigilant that the gamecos will push it as far as they can until the public rejects it and the whole system fails (which, as Paul pointed out, is where PC gaming is.)
But when the chief attack is "I don't want to pay full price" - and I'm not saying my beautiful commenters said that - I find myself lacking in sympathy when the publishers find a way to ding you for another tenner.
Buy fewer, buy better, buy smarter.
I see your point, there are plenty of places that sell used books or movies, but not one giant chain (Game Stop) that exists in nearly every strip mall in the country. No other entertainment industry has to deal with competition like that.
I would only hope that if a company is going to charge someone who bought used that it isn't something like removing the final levels of a game (so that the story is still playable years later - there's no guarantee that access would still available).
And I'll admit I overreached with the library comment - heck book publishers probably love them, they always come back to buy more.
I think digital distribution may solve many of these issues in a significant way. It has already rescued PC gaming from the failure of its key/voucher-strangled physical media business, and the console publishers, while fighting resale instead of piracy, are sliding down the same slope to self-annihilation the PC business was.
The efficiencies of digital distribution, however, haven't been as horrible to end users as you'd think. Both the PSN and XBLA have sales on games from time to time, and as content ages and the cost of delivery of a pack of bytes goes down over time (for the ISP, anyway), publishers seem to be enjoying throwing a switch for a weekend, week, or month and putting hit titles on sale in a way that disc-based media can only dream of. And, surprise surprise, they say it's worth it and they come out ahead, in many cases way ahead.
The achilles heel is the ISP. Ah the carriers, strangling game delivery innovation along with mobile device advancement, personal computing, and a myriad of businesses that can't rely on high quality broadband when the carrier has no competition to speak of.