NIDZUMI+

I’m sure we are all guilty of the perishable crime of buying a preowned game. Be it a big name exclusively games only retailer or through an online distributor, the easy and most importantly cheap nature of used games makes it so appealing.

Publishers and Developers are now starting to frown upon retailers and buyers who facilitate such a market because it halts sales of new copies which in turn stops the publisher making money. But is this rapidly accelerating hate towards this trade really just diverting analysts eyes from what is a lack of ideas on the publishers side.

Now that’s not to cast away the flurry of new ideas that games have. Look at titles like Mirror’s Edge, Bioshock and much more that are pushing the ideas front with innovative settings and concepts. I’m referring to ideas for the publisher to make more money from a game.

DLC for example can be a great way of making funds. You can’t sell it or buy used and any distribution costs are practically cut. It’s just a shame to see tons and tons of meaningless and forgettable downloadable content. Obviously with this market being new a lot of publishers are either too scared to experiment or are experimenting and failing.

Burnout Paradise had free game changing updates and the game did see a noticeable sales spikes. But on the other hand slightly less incremental content is now being charged at over the odd rates. Fair play to EA for trying this idea but surely overpriced minimal content is an admission that this hasn’t succeeded.

Ad support games could be the way forward but advertisement providers IGA whose work is seen in Burnout Paradise along with a few other games have started to show the affects of the recession. Meanwhile browser only Quake Live is about to launch for free but with adverts throughout. It remains to be seen if this will be done subtly. The industry as a whole seems to take ideas and push them way to far and in game advertisement will probably be the same. Still if they are used irrelevant to the situation or if they pummel you to death with corporate messages then the game will be panned for inappropriate use.

Microsoft played around with the idea of bonus’ for new copies of Gears of War 2. The ‘Flashback Map Pack’ which contained various maps from the original can be bought by anyone over Xbox Live Marketplace. While anyone who bought the game new received a downloadable code that entitled them to get it for free. Encouraging people to buy new but not by segregation or overcharging.

These ideas all do little to change the overbearing curve of shoppers learning towards the more attractive and appealing side of preowned games. Maybe all publishers have to do is be more competitive with their prices compared to used games. If they allowed their retail products to take hits on the pricing, in the long run they would see profit as some sales are better than none.

Still the used gaming market is here to stay. Music, Films and TV all suffer from preowned markets but they have ways to support the artists or production companies other than the final product. Gaming has DLC and constantly changing advertisement markets that can be capitalized on. Then if they make their new games more competitive with used games then developers will make it through the recession better off.