Everyone's losing the battle to keep you from buying used.

Everyone’s losing the battle to keep you from buying used.

Submitted by Stephen Munn on December 4, 2006 – 8:32 pm7 Comments

Game publishers don’t want you to buy used games. And, why would they? They have no way of knowing how many times that game changes hands, and as far as they’re concerned, everyone who buys it second-hand would otherwise have bought it first-hand. One could call this the RIAA leap of logic.

How does the RIAA keep people from uh, buying used? Value-added functionality on your CD. Throwing in a DVD. Basically giving you a bonus for plunking down too much money for a CD that cost them almost nothing to produce. Let’s look at what the games industry does.

Throwing in a pre-order bonus for a game has the dual benefit (for the publisher) of gauging demand before release and creating an incentive to buy the game new. I remember buying Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for Gamecube a few years ago and getting Splinter Cell for free. But even when the bonus item is pretty spectacular like that was (spectacular is a stretch perhaps, I didn’t like Splinter Cell and resold it… oh, the irony), a preorder bonus can only have limited effect. The main issue is that once the game launches, the preorder has no point. It doesn’t drive sales, because the promotion immediately ends. At the risk of suggesting something valuable to me is taken away in favor of something that has so far been useless, here’s a suggestion:

Nintendo has a program by which you register their products on their website, and it keeps track of them. You can go there any time, sign on, and look at all the money you’ve given them over the years. The idea is, every once in a while, they offer you free stuff that people who haven’t spent all that money can’t get at. The beauty of the system is how effective it is at making you buy a game new. The registration code for the software is printed on a little paper insert in the game’s case. Most of the time when you buy a game used, this tiny slip of paper is gone. And even if it weren’t, you can’t register a code that’s already registered by someone else. Trust me, I tried. It was an accident, I swear.

How much money does all this add up to?

The problem with their system is they don’t give you anything worthwhile, when they give you anything at all. No free games, no free strategy guides, no tee shirts. Here’s a complete list of what I’ve gotten for registering my stuff.

Tags: pre-order, swag, used games

Nathan

I’ve been complaining about this for the past 6 years but no one listened. Late 2000 Nintendo Japan saw this problem with the boom of used game sales in Japan. However Nintendo combated that with Club Nintendo. What used to be little trinkets, Club Nintendo now offers exclusive stuff you can’t get anywhere else. Mario figures, one of a kind Mario hat DS slip holder, ect. Not only does Nintendo America have to start dealing with this but every game maker and system developer out there must as well.
Every one of us gamers spend thousands of dollars each year on the video game industry. They need that money. However, Gamestop is now sucking in nearly 40% of the game industry’s possible wealth. All of those games on the shelf a few dollars off may not seem like a value for a scratched disc for some, but many it’s more cash in their pocket and they won’t spend it.
However. If you could redeem points for items, you could get cool swag and gifts from the company because YOU support them. We, us gamers, support and run even own the companies that develop games. We determine who lives and who dies. With Gamestop in the way, we determine less and Gamestop is just a virus eating away at the gaming industry until they have no money left to survive.
With the cost of game production at a staggering level approaching movie production cost, something has to be done to gain our attention and our cash. It may only cost the company $2 to make an awesome one of a kind T-shirt or emblem or action figure. But it could save their butts if it gets more of us to go buy the game new.
As it is I’m nearing going Gamefly because I just can’t stand paying out $59 per 360 game and then more for the onslaught of Wii games to come. I need a reason to pay full price. The games are not enough. They just aren’t good enough. So if they can’t make good games, they have to cut cost of the title or give me something spectacular.

Take a second to check how many Gamestop/EB stores are within 25 miles of you. If they can support having that many stores, that means they make way more than they should off of used games. $59 for a new 360 game. $53 for a used $360 game. Gamestop pays you $37 and turns around to sell that game for $53 making $16. All they did was open it, look at the disc, gave you money and put a sticker on it. That’s some good money. Money that game makers don’t get. When it’s all said and done Gamestop made $16 and you cost the game industry nearly $50. The rest is materials and printing which is wasted on a new game that will sit on the shelf.

I hate Gamestop. Gamestop is the video game equivalent to Wal-Mart. Sorry for the length. I just want my view heard.
http://spyder.wordpress.com Andrew Herron

Just be glad you get anything, Nintendo Australia don’t even have a place to register your purchases

(we don’t get anything more than a ‘service is working’ wifi page either )
John H.

Andrew, so it’s better to be able to register products and get nothing than not be able to report your purchase back to the mothership to begin with?

I managed to jump on the wagon in time to take advantage of the only good extra sent out to US players, the Zelda Collector’s Disk with Ocarina of Time: Master’s Quest on it. It feels good to rummage through a game store and find a used copy of that for $40….

In the multiple years since then, they have offered absolutely no registration bonus worth mentioning, while Japan got an exclusive DS game not long ago, a compilation of three Game & Watch titles! Sometimes Nintendo of America really sucks.
http://pfff.net vtraveller

You make a valid point, or should I say progression, but I can see this all going two different ways.

For Nintendo I can see the points system mapping quite nicely to Wii online game awards. After all, a critical part of the Wii is the back catalogue available online.

But on the darkside of the coin I see resale dying with online activation. WoW does it, FFXI does it, pretty much anything with online gameplay denies you resale of the original installation disks; which to me is crazy as I’d have thought all the profit was in the subscription.

I can see this getting a lot worse. Games locked to consoles; therefore you have to hump your console to your mates if you want to show off a game.

To us as consumers this is all petty swabbling for beans. We hark on about gameplay and making things good; the potential for DRM and its anti-consumer, sorry, RIAA type business model has to be a turn off.

What options do we have? If you see any of it, vote with your feet ‘cos it hurts them in a long run rather than our pockets.
Stephen

John M, I got the Zelda Collector’s Edition as a preorder bonus for Wind Waker, not for registering games. I know they were also giving that away as a bonus for subscribing to Nintendo Power.
James

I don’t think you’re looking that hard. I recall seeing a pre-order special for Twilight Princess that came with a soundtrack CD. That sounds like a damn good deal to me. There really isn’t much else.

Sony’s pretty much cornered the market on this kind of stuff. I get a free game demo whenever I walk into a Gamestop or EB, much less buy anything for my PSP nowadays. Tekken DR came with a nifty wrist strap. http://game.salesmunn.com/index.php?p=45

I hope Nintendo fans don’t take this the wrong way but it really seems like they don’t listen to the fanbase all that much. They’re going to do it their way or the highway. It’s definitely screwed them here and there in the past, but that’s just the way they work.
Sammael

Well, there always is the other side of things – make you WANT to hold on to your game. Give a reason to blow the dust off of your collection on occassion. Noone really seems to do this anymore.

I remember playing Dungeon Keeper and there happened to be a full moon that day. Well, a level opened up on my map that was playable only that day. I think it is the only time a game truly surprised me with something along the lines of hidden content. (I don’t remember the level being all that significant)

Why not make me want to keep it? Have X game? Pop it in to get a free download! Swap discs to show what you have and get a free character otherwise unaccessible! (or even a save with the current day’s date)…. There are so many ways to promote keeping the games you’ve played. It seems the focus is more on the launch numbers, hence the pre-order bonuses readily available, but most of them are such crap nowadays.

Limited edition is bullshit now most of the time.
“OOOhhh! A tin case!!!!!! Wow!” yeah, great that the tin case comes with a DVD of commercials of the game I just bought, a poorly edited video of behind the scenes that should have been edited for bordem and more commercials for other games that this publisher would love to sell to me. I am getting sick of the industry recycling marketing materials and charging for them.

No more limited editions for me unless there is a goddamned soundtrack, t-shirt (a nice one at that) or something else that won’t make me want to throw it at the clerk when he asks if I want a strategy guide……