Be Excellent To Each Other

This from Eurogamer:-



The mind boggles!

Fails purely on the basis that most of those games are available for £34 or less new already from elsewhere.

Also, surely you could take your copy of Dragon Age 2 in, and then point to their price list for pre-ordering it, point out that they've already made £34 on it, so you want at least £30 for it?

It seems like putting themselves in a terrible bargaining position.

Well already Gamestation will match CEX trade in prices +£1, and they frequently give £30+ for new releases.

I'm really not keen on pre-owned. Saving a few quid by cutting the throats of the publishers does not sit well with me. I used to get pre-owned DS stuff at £8 for the older games, like Advance Wars Dual Strike, but only a handful from CEX in all those years. Half of Game now seems pre-owned and their stock is getting worse and worse. In fact, I was incredibly surprised to find that the PC gaming section seems way better stocked than the Eggs Box section.

Surely Game must see the dead end of this strategy of theirs?

Oh please, publishers can fuck off. It's their fault that nobody can afford games unless they're second hand anyway.

That said, I'd rather just wait a bit longer and get them for about 20% of the price anyway.

Seriously? I think games are pretty cheap for what you get. Most are £30 round where I am, tops, and I get a lot of fun out of 'em. Bad Company 2 was definitely worth £30, as was The Orange Box and the Left 4 Deads amd Mass Effect 2. Most I get for £20 when they've hit mid-budget, like Silent Hunter 4, and even though that was criminally bugged the mod community has made something glorious out of it. In comparison to a night out, in a pound per hour or so I get good value. Those are PC games though, don't know the cash state of X-Boxing or P-Stationing.

Hold on, didn't we have this argument with absolutely no resolution before, Sinister Agent?

Ehhhhh..


That's it. Wait it out and Amazon (or insert name of fave online dealership here) will give it to you in exchange for £15. They'll send you the game, too. Buy second hand, and the only people benefiting are Game and the scallies who brought in their ill-got gains for part exchange.

Besides, we keep publishers afloat so they might send some scraps to the devs. And they are the ones making the games that we love/hate/endure [delete as appropriate].

I rarely buy them second hand; I just wait. You can get most things for a good price if you give it time.

I personally never buy second hand games from high street retailers, because judging from the people I knew at secondary school, it's inevitable that a proportion of those games are acquired via burglaries to sell on. I'm not keen on buying stolen goods.

I only ever buy games second hand if they are significantly cheaper than the best new price. Also if they don't have any stuff missing like EA games (or the significantly cheaper is enough cheaper that it seems like a better deal even having stuff removed).

I also think games are probably better value now than they have ever been before.

I don't buy pre-owned because I don't trust people not to treat their games like shit, not through any moral choice. I can't even trust 95% of people to wash their hands after they've been to the toilet; why would I then go on to buy their used goods?

Spectrum Full Price Game in 1982- £5.99
Inflation adjusted to 2008 - £14.10

Amstrad Disc Game in 1987 - £14.99
Inflation adjusted to 2008 - £30.24

Amiga Game in 1993 - £24.99
Inflation adjusted to 2008 - £36.48

And that's 2008 prices and doesn't take into account VAT rises which I think would put them at £16, £32, £38.50 in 2011 by my reckoning.

And if you want to get really silly, I have a memory of Street Fighter 2 being £60 at launch which would place it at £100 in modern money.

Still think modern games are overpriced? Considering all but the newest games are discounted I don't think they are. I did pay full price for Halo but it was worth it as I'm only starting to tire of it 5 months later.

Most of my games are second hand, because fuck spending over £25 for a game, I don't really care about where it came from.

If the game publishers/debs/whoever feel I owe them that extra tenner or so, they can go get different jobs.

I'll occasionally buy second hand games, I can see no more objection to it in principle than buying second hand cars or books or records, or going to a library. Clearly it isn't harming the publishers that much because second hand games have been around for almost as long as the games industry.

As for a large number of them obviously being stolen, what utter bollocks. There are relatively few burglaries (and judging by the numbers of copies of each recent used game at Blockbusters there would need to be hundreds occurring every single night, or perhaps only dozens but all on the homes of keen gamers) but loads of people who trade games in when they're done with them.

I have a mixture of pre-owned and new(cheap) games.

I am not adverse to pre-owned as the publishers have already had there shilling from the new sale.

Be interesting if you could get the average cost of making the game, too - I'll bet it was about £2,000 in 1982.

If I buy new, it's because I want something on release day or thereabouts, but there's a decreasing number of games that fit that bill. Rock Band 3 was one, but the last was Test Drive Unlimited 2 and having rather serious bugs on a released game doesn't fill me with confidence about buying new.

Is it too reprehensible to buy second hand just because you want to save some money. I once bought a game (great story this, by the way) second hand because it was five pound cheaper than retail and it meant I could then pay for my car park without going to get some more money out. I also bought a bottle of pop and a chocolate bar. Twist, I think it was.

Not reprehensible at all. Just a case of Supply meeting his old friend Demand

Don't you work in a library?

The price of 8 bit games seems to rise with the move away from bedroom coders to softies hiring development companies or starting up their own in house dev teams.

Considering even the newest releases can be got for under 40 quid, games really aren't that expensive. £15.99 for the "budget" is astonishing value all things considered.

In a world where I bought Just Cause 2 for a fiver, new, shipped, I cannot complain about game costs.

Apart from COD map packs, obv, which I still buy anyway.

*Cough* *Cough*

*Adjusts collar*

Errr....

Interesting to see how big the market was then, too. Were there are many amigas as, say, modern PCs, or wii consoles? I suspect not.

Games are getting a bit cheaper, yeah, but it took bloody long enough, and is only happening largely because the market has changed to suit the customer over the last decade, despite all the desperate flailing and bullshitting by many companies to stop the sea change. We haven't seen the end of it either, and with any luck in another ten years, the idea that people would charge £40 for a game will seem quaint.

I really don't get why the idea that buying games second hand is somehow immoral because the poor orphan multi-billion pound industry, which has never been as large, influential, or profitable, won't be able to get more money that way, even though it's the only way a lot of people can even afford to buy new games (and even then, they tend to give away most of their old ones to do so at a fraction of their value). If someone's bought something, they can do what they bloody well want with it, and that includes selling it on. It's the same for almost every other thing it's possible to buy or sell, and no amount of industry propaganda will make games any different.

Bah. I wanted to pre-order a pre-owned game which they've resealed and are selling as new.

Don't authors get a payment when their books are borrowed from a library? Or did I just make that up?

Sales figures for the 8 bit era are hard to come by. I think it's fairly well known that Fantasy World Dizzy shifted 250,000 copies but that's about it.

Robocop stayed on top of the 8 bit charts for a year and a half but I can't even find any sales figures for that.

[edit] Jetpac sold 300,000 copies according to one vague source.

Pretty sure you're making it up. The library typically buys the book in the first place, of course.

I believe some made a fuss about that a few years back. The vast majority, of course, told that some to get tae fuck.

I think. Might be thinking of something else entirey.

This group over see it:
http://www.plr.uk.com/index.htm

No idea how much they pay, mind.

http://www.culture.gov.uk/news/news_stories/7713.aspx



6.25 pence! Bloody rich la-di-da authors, sitting in their gentlemen's club with their top hats and sipping their vintage brandy, lording it over us with all the huge amounts of cash they get from public libraries. It makes me sick, it does.

I know. Poor old JK Rowling's down to her last few billions.

I wonder if that scheme ever pays more than it costs to administer.

Of course, second hand games will kill the videogames industry, just like second-hand bookshops have killed the book industry and second-hand cars have killed the automotive industry.

Remember when home taping killed music?

To a publisher isn't a second hand sale the same as a pirated copy?

Both are lost sales.

To a publisher with no understanding of how trade works, yes. Or one who's simply deliberately distorting facts. In reality, the second sale has nothing to do with them and is none of their business.

A lot of them do seem to think that they have some kind of divine right to be given infinite money forever, and anyone who prevents this from happening is a criminal and a thief. I ordered a jacket last week, and it arrived today. I could sell it right now for whatever the hell I wanted, and the companies who made and sold it wouldn't bat an eyelid, because it's mine to do with as I please, and if someone else wants to buy a second-hand one, that's their choice too. And that's actually how it is with games, and how it should stay, however many hissy fits a publisher throws and however many articles they buy.

Don't worry. His Jobsian Majesty is no doubt working on the clothing section on the Itunes store even as we speak.

I think it's capped at 500 quid or something like that, as well.

Edit: It's £6,600

Sizes:

Normal
Beanpole
Silhouette

I like to buy new but reduced copies of games, but I've bought plenty of second hand ones.

I'd like to see more games released on vinyl though.

I think the argument has been in the past that it's possible to buy a game, copy it, and then sell it, whilst still using it yourself.

The Internet has lessened this (in that you can have direct downloads of games on or before release), but I imagine it's still possible to extent, and we all know how hard it is it get most industries to change habits...

MAlc

I haven't heard a noise like that in my head since John Coffey stopped posting.

So you don't think that Game and the other high street shops' strong focus on commercialising the pre-owned market reduces the sales of new games by even one copy? And you're comfortable with decrying publishers as greedy whilst not caring that games shops can make 25-50% profit margins on pre-owned sales?

They should bring flexidiscs back.

I'm pretty comfortable with decrying as greedy anyone who doesn't think that a particular product should have a resale market when pretty much everything else does. Why do games publishers think their products are anything different to cars?

I guess the way they'd like for them to be perceived is more like cinema tickets. But at the moment they sell them on discs in shops so they aren't like that, they're like books and CDs so they can go and get fucked.

I wonder if you would ever get a publisher refusing to supply new games to a chain because of their preowned policies.