The Death of 'Teen'
Posted on Friday, February 3 2012 @ 08:48:29 Eastern

One brisk August day in 1992, a former amusement park manufacturer turned game publisher rolled a brand new cabinet into video arcades across America. It was a two-player black upright, bound with bright red bordering and sporting a generic combat graphic emblazoned on the wood siding. As commercial electricity coursed through the cabinet’s wiring for the first time, a cathode ray tube began firing electrons one line at a time against a fluorescent screen, painting a pixilated logo into existence on the monitor. From the speakers, a deep announcing voice boomed out to join the hundreds of sirens, bleeps, and explosions from similar cabinets lining the arcade hall.

And then a twelve-year old child, unaware that his actions would come to define an entire industry and its customers for over a decade, tore out the gore-covered spine of his opponent and watched blood drip down the vertibrae and onto the freshly shucked corpse crumpled at his feet.

The cabinet’s marquee, backlit by two bulbs, read brightly against the ambiance of the arcade hall: Mortal Kombat.

Two months later, Konami released Lethal Enforcers, an arcade light gun game in which the player, a police officer on break at the local donut shop, receives a distress call and proceeds to kill more criminals, Triad gang members, militant soldiers, and drug dealers than Jack Bauer and Robocop combined. One DAY after that, Sega released Night Trap, a live-action video game in which the player saves female slumber party participants from Augers and Vampires by triggering traps. At night. Mortal Kombat and Lethal Enforcers would soon also make their way to home consoles.

These three games, two violent and one not really trying as hard as it could have, were almost single-handedly responsible for the US Senate hearings on video game violence in 1992 and 1993. During the December 9th hearings in 1993, Joseph Lieberman denounced Night trap as a disgusting, violent game that encouraged players to “trap and kill women,” cementing his place in video game political history as one of the first politicians to have no understanding of the issues he was campaigning against.

The video game industry teetered at a precipice. And then John Carmack, possibly furious at Wolfenstein’s absence from the hearings despite predating Mortal Kombat by three months, said, “Boy, this would be a great time to unleash that game about shooting thousands of demons in Hell.” On December 10th, 1993, Doom was released. Nine months later, the ESRB was established to oversee video game content ratings.

It wasn’t until the 32-bit era, however, that the effect of ESRB ratings on game design moved to the forefront. With the ability to express violence becoming less and less hardware-restricted, a game’s target rating became part of every early-stage design document. In a similar vein to PG-13 blockbusters, ‘Teen’ became the de facto standard for big budget console games that wanted the benefits of combat-based gameplay and adult story elements but were afraid to alienate a major portion of their largely under 18 audience (PC gamers, a traditionally much older audience, were never particularly impacted by ESRB activities). This had the somewhat unintended consequence of turning the ‘Mature’ rating into a call sign for poor quality and exploitative gameplay.

Then came Halo. Is there anything this freaking game didn’t do? In our context, it proved that a ‘Mature’ game could launch as a flagship property and be wildly successful. Whether gamers were getting older or parents more jaded, the success of Halo was a watershed moment in publishers’ understanding of how ratings affected sales.

These days, the ESRB is supposed to promote education and understanding about video games. But in public appearances, they pretty much act as apologists for mature games. Their argument is less “mature games have their place” and more “the majority of games are not rated mature please ignore those bad mature games.” One of their favorite statistics to bandy about in interviews is the percentage of rated games that receive a ‘Mature’ rating. Here are copies of their ‘Rating Category Breakdown’ report for 2010 and 2011.



Compelling data. Let’s say that half the games rated in 2010 and half rated in 2011 were actually released in 2011. That makes 1,485 games released in 2011, with 23.2% rated ‘Teen’ and 6.8% rated ‘Mature’. With publishing ratios like those, ‘Teen’ games will be outselling ‘Mature’ games until our sun becomes something Interstellar Santa stuffs in the stockings of Milky Way alien spawn.

Except ‘Mature’ games already outsell ‘Teen’ games in the United States.

Among the top 100 games, they’ve been doing it for half a decade:


Data source: VGChartz.com

What is startling about this trend is not that ‘Mature’ games are selling more, but the RATE at which 'Mature' games are capturing market share. In 2006, ‘Mature’ games owned 19.6% of the top 100 software sales and ‘Teen’ games owned 22.2%. Six years later, ‘Mature’ market share has more than DOUBLED to 40.6%, while ‘Teen’ game sales have fallen by over half to 9.3%, buoyed up from 7.4% in 2010 by the release of Uncharted 3 and Batman: Arkham City.

“Not so fast, assface! All those ‘Mature’ game sales are coming from two or three big-name games. The majority of games on that top 100 list are still ‘Teen’!”

That’s a great point, Mr. Strawman. Let’s look at only the count of top 100-selling software, instead:
               
Data source: VGChartz.com

Surprise! Not only are ‘Mature’ games outselling ‘Teen’ games, but publishers are investing in more AAA ‘Mature’ games than ever before.

“Fine, dickhead! Then the reverse is true: All those ‘Mature’ games are making the sales number look higher, but on a per-game basis, ‘Teen’ games still outsell ‘Mature’ games!”

Hi-yah:
               
Data source: VGChartz.com

So not only are there more ‘Mature’ games, but on average these games are more profitable than ‘Teen’ games. Yikes.

“Fuck you, scrotumjowls! Then this entire comparison is worthless, because the top 100 games only represent a small portion of total software sales!”

Wrong again… sort of. In 2011, VGChartz estimated total US software sales to be 291.85 million units. At 115.19 million units, the top 100 games make up 39.5% of the total games market, with the other estimated 1,300 games making up the remainder (I would expect that this number overestimates the total games that VGChartz actually forecasts). Not exactly an insignificant chunk of the market.

However, because VGChartz’ top 100 software list counts a release on each console as a separate game, we are more likely to see big releases appear multiple times (once for PS3 and once for Xbox360); this magnifies the impact of AAA titles while pushing others off the list. In fact, our top 100 software list in 2011 is composed of just 78 unique games due to this double-counting. We can use 2010 data from the NPD group, published by the ESA, to view the entire game marketplace and confirm that the trend is still applicable, albeit watered-down:
               

Seeing the discrepancy between total market and top 100 numbers, it is important to recognize what makes the top 100 list so much more interesting to look at: these are the games receiving the most development and marketing dollars per year. No publisher is going to arbitrarily accept whatever rating the ESRB spits out—if a top 100 game is rated ‘Mature’, it is rated so because the publisher believes that this will help to increase sales.

One of the best ways to see the intentional trend towards ‘Mature’ games is to look at major franchises and how their ratings have shifted over time. Battlefield is the prime example: the franchise began with ‘Teen’ rated Battlefield 1942 in 2002 and stayed ‘Teen’ throughout all its major releases, including Battlefield 2 in 2005, Battlefield 2142 in 2006, Battlefield: Bad Company in 2008, and Battlefield 1943 in July 2009.

And then, in March 2010, came Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Releasing on the heels November 2009’s CoD: Modern Warfare 2, a competing, ‘Mature’ war FPS franchise that broke most major video game sales records on release, Bad Company 2 signaled a significant change in presentation for the Battlefield series. The game violence was ramped up to a ‘Mature’ rating, and the packaging was reworked to feature an imposing, heavily shadowed infantryman in the foreground, with the series’ signature vehicles taking a backseat. Battlefield 3 continued with both trends in its 2011 release.

In speaking of Call of Duty, the original began as a ‘Teen’ wartime FPS in 2003, continuing as such through Call of Duty 2 in 2006 and Call of Duty 3 in 2007. And then came Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2008. The series bumped up the violence to ‘Mature’ and the packaging shifted from wartime murals to an imposing, heavily shadowed infantryman. The series has been ‘Mature’ ever since.

In fact, the only time we see a ‘Mature’ series lower its rating to ‘Teen’ is when a console franchise is being ported to handhelds (or in the case of a massive stylistic failure, as with Prince of Persia—in which the forced move to ‘Mature’ in 2004 robbed the game of its wondrous charm and added very little in return).

So if companies are pushing major ‘Mature’ title releases more than ever, why are consumers responding? This is, unfortunately, the much harder question to answer. The age old claim that “gamers are getting older” likely has some merit, but the data isn’t clear enough to make a judgment. For example, the ESA tells us that in 2011 the average game player is 37, with just 18% of gamers under the age of 18. However, these numbers are inclusive of ALL gaming and can’t be applied directly to the core consoles that compose our top 100 software list. How many of that number are 60 year olds playing Bookworm Adventures or Bejeweled on their Amiga smartphones?

Are Americans becoming more desensitized to violence, therefore in need of greater and more visceral quantities to stimulate them? Certainly the darling explanation for major media outlets, and we did see growth in ‘Mature’ games rated by the ESRB as a percent of the whole in 2011 vs. 2010. But two data points form a line, not a trend—the jury is still out on this one.

As a final attempt, let’s take one more slice of our ‘Mature’ vs. ‘Teen’ by release sales data, this time by major platform. We’ll take the percent excess sales of the average ‘Mature’ game vs. the average ‘Teen’ game: a rating above zero means that the average ‘Mature’ title on the platform sold better, and a rating below zero means that the average ‘Teen’ title sold better. A missing data point signifies that one or both type of game was not present on the top 100 list for that year:


Data source: VGChartz.com

Now that is interesting. ‘Teen’ games performed better on the Wii, while ‘Mature’ games were superior on the PS3 and Xbox360. Could this imply something about differentiated user bases?

Unfortunately, the top 100 list becomes our enemy in this instance. The Wii is underperforming its compatriots in 2007 and 2009 because the entire Wii ‘Mature’ category contains a single game in both years. In 2007, the game is Resident Evil 4, Wii Edition, a title that had been released two years earlier on every major console. In 2009, the game was Call of Duty: Modern Warefare: Reflex Edition, a game that was released in conjunction with strictly superior product offerings on both the PS3 and Xbox360. Not really enough data to draw a strong conclusion.

And sadly, this is where the trail grows cold, at least for now. There are many reasons that the shift towards ‘Mature’ games might be happening, but to claim I had the answer would be to slap you in the face with argumentative phalluses. I can only say with certainty that this cultural shift is happening, HAS happened, and is almost certainly here to stay.

So I turn the question over to you: With games like Uncharted and Batman: Arkham City showing that it is possible to create a rich, uncompromising experience at a ‘Teen’ rating (frankly, the latter game is darker and more gruesome than most so-called ‘Mature’ titles), why do you think we are seeing this continued push towards the big ‘M’? Can you name any other franchises that have undergone the ‘Mature’ shuffle?

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One Score to Rule Them All
Posted on Friday, December 9 2011 @ 11:53:32 Eastern

Sit down and grab some popcorn: this is a long one.

(Thanks to Bras for the article suggestion.)
 
Have I ever told you the story of Metacritic? Let me tell you the story of Metacritic.
 
Once upon a time, there lived a man in the basement of his parent’s one-story home. He did not shower. He did not shave. By day, he slept, the basement’s single window smothered with a throw pillow stolen from the above world. By night, he ate Cheetos, drank Mountain Dew, and laughed with unnatural volume in voice chat while smoking pot beneath a disconnected smoke alarm. [Ugh, is that you? ~Ed. Anthony]
 
He read video game reviews like this:
 
*open* scrollscrollscrollscrollscroll...  8/10 *close*
 
On one such night, after toking a particularly big spliff of some good sensimilla, the man spoke aloud, to no one in particular, “Gee-suhs. It sure would be nice if these reviews didn’t have all that pointless garbage dumped between the game title and the score”.
 
And so, fueled by an overly functional high, the man pulled out his sharpest pair of scissors and went to work, clipping out the text from every video game review in all the major gaming magazines and his hard copy of the internet. What remained were neatly organized lists of scores for all games, each about as long as the man’s arm.
 
As the man surveyed his work, he noticed a most curious pattern: a large portion of review scores for each game were numbers between zero and one hundred. A thought came to mind. “Why, if I were to simply average the grades of these eighty game reviews, I would get--” he counted carefully on his fingers-- “One review instead of eighty! That’s eighty times less reading”! Hastily, he sketched out his vision, complete with annotations:
 


The man looked again at the context-stripped clippings that lay before him. Some of the paper scraps held numbers out of ten, out of five, and out of four, rather than out of one hundred. Others had no numbers whatsoever and displayed only arcane hieroglyphics, such as ‘B+’ and ‘C-‘. A few scraps were blank—the entireties of those reviews had been contained in the texts that the man had excised from each publication.
 
“This is of no concern”, said the man. He then proceeded to cough for two minutes straight, finally recovering on his third attempt and continuing his monologue.
 
“For the numbers, I will multiply by ten, twenty, or twenty-five to force a score out of 100. To these mysterious symbols, I shall apply a transfiguration of my own design, one which transforms game review ‘B’s into academic ‘C’s and game review ‘C’s into academic ‘F-‘s, as was surely the intent of the review publishers. And for any reviews that dare eschew the distillation of human experience into a two-character expression, I shall assign my own score based on my interpretation of the review text I removed in the first place”.
 
The man’s scraggly beard bristled into a grin. “But why stop there? As an arbiter of taste, I know that some of these numbers are, in fact, WORSE NUMBERS than others”. Here, he paused to waggle an accusatory finger at the offending parchments. “Rather than remove these numbers less worthy, I will instead assign hidden weightings to each of the newly-divined review scores. Then, and only then, shall I take the average of all transformed, weighted scores”.
 
Outside the basement window, a lazy evening breeze drifted by, but one that totally could have turned into a howling wind, like, at any second.
 
“AND LO, THIS SINGLE SCORE SHALL DETERMINE, BEFORE ALL OTHERS, THE TRUE MERIT THAT WHICH TO ANY GAME SHALL BE ASSIGNED”!
 
Then the man snorted a pile of coke the size of his fist and coded for 45 hours straight, and that’s basically where Metacritic came from.
 
Now let me tell you why it sucks.
 
Metacritic currently plays host to three hundred forty-three video game publications, both magazines and professional review websites, covering everything from major platforms to casual games/apps.  The vast majority of publications are North/South American, European, and Australian, with Asia receiving roughly the same representation as Africa and Antarctica (e.g. zero) save for a couple hundred archived Weekly Famitsu reviews from Japan that stopped in 2006. [Maybe this is why they stopped archiving Famitsu. ~ Ed. Anthony]
 
My original goal in writing this article was to search for factors that separated high-scoring publications from low-scoring publications—could I use Metacritic’s data to determine conclusively whether certain video game review outlets were nothing more than corporate shills? To begin, I pruned away any publication with fewer than 100 reviews—arbitrary, to be sure, but I wanted a number that made me comfortable enough that the average review score wouldn’t be overly influenced by certain months in which all the AAA titles seem to be released (an article for a later day, perhaps). I then chopped this data set, currently at 285 publications, down further by removing all ‘inactive’ reviewers. Three recent, high-profile game releases that spanned all major platforms (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword) were chosen to represent the active set. If a publication did not review at least one of these games, it was not included in the data set.
 
What resulted was a list of one hundred sixteen publications, each with an average review score calculated by Metacritic (sans weighting). All together, the data set looked like this:
 

 
Here’s a quick quiz: can you guess where each of the following high-profile U.S. publications landed?
GamePro GameTrailers Game Informer Joystiq Destructoid GameSpy Giant Bomb 1UP IGN GameSpot Game Revolution  

 
Metacritic has Game Revolution’s average score at 64--a full four points below the next closest publication. Of course, when you’re converting a ‘B’ grade to a 75/100 and a ‘C’ to a 50/100, it isn’t hard to see why. In fact, every score below an ‘A-‘ is converted lower than its American academic equivalent—it is no wonder that publishers don’t send these guys review copies. Were Game Revolution to begin covering as much shovelware as other publications (yet another topic for a later day), I would expect that average to plummet well into the mid fifties.
 
So, any publication grading on a letter scale is out. But that still leaves 112 review websites and magazines just waiting to be analyzed. Since they all grade on a number scale, there should be no issue with comparing their scores against one another once everything is converted to the same numerical base. Right?
 
You are not going to believe this.
 
Among publications that score numerically, there are a wide variety of grading scales. Pictured below are the ones I encountered while poring through the remaining 112 publications:
 

 
That’s a lot of different numbers. But what if the numbers themselves didn’t actually matter? We know that Metacritic converts all of its scores to an ‘out of 100’ grade—doing so is the primary mechanism that allows the website to justify its averaging of disparate review grades into a single Metascore. So let’s apply that same conversion directly to the grading scales:
 

 
Now that’s a clearer picture. As long as a grading scale has the same amount of grade intervals, or what we’ll call ‘degrees of differentiation’ here, the Metacritic conversion treats the scales as identical. This is because the intervals between each number in a given scale are identical. In fact, we can boil down any numerical grading scale that meets this criteria to just the degrees of differentiation. For instance, out of five half points and out of ten whole points both have 10 degrees of differentiation, while out of ten decimal and out of one hundred whole points both have 100 degrees. Metacritic’s methodology implies that there is no difference between these scales. Ten degree scales are the same as twenty degree scales are the same as one hundred degree scales—they’re all out of 100, so just average them!
 
But what if this wasn’t the case? What if a publication’s average review grade was affected simply by number of discrete intervals they placed after a perfect score? Imagine that I have five games of varying quality, and I want to express to my readership that each game is worse than the one above it. In order to find five unique points of grade differentiation, I would have to travel farther down the numerical part of a ten degree scale (100,90,80,70,60) than I would down a one hundred degree scale (100, 99, 98, 97, 96). Even if I held the exact same relative opinion about how much I enjoyed the games, my nominal grades would change solely based on the scale I was using.
 
An extreme hypothetical case, to be sure, but the question remains: is it possible that some publications score games lower than others only based on their grading scale, even if everyone is using the same equivalent numerical range?
 
 Not only is it possible; it is the god-damned truth.
 

 
Ignoring the lone 5 degree entry, all of the above differences are statistically significant at the 90% confidence level. The difference in score between 20 degrees and 100 degrees is significant at the 95% confidence level. The difference in score between 10 degrees and 100 degrees is significant at the 99.9% confidence level.
 
What does it all mean? It means that an 80/100 on a one hundred degree scale and an 80/100 on a ten degree scale are DIFFERENT grades. It means that if I am a game reviewer, I will score the exact same game an average of 4 points out of 100 less if I use a ten degree scale versus a one hundred degree scale. It means that by averaging together all review scores for a game and then stacking up each individual publication against that average, Metacritic is falsely portraying a fair score comparison where none actually exists.
 
Now, I’ll level with you: In the grand scheme of things, this is more a moral concern than a practical one. Because most major game review publications manage to review most major games, the Metascore is equally skewed for all of them. Generally, Metacritic serves its purpose—the better games get better scores and vice versa. What the above issue demonstrates is actually a portion of a much more fundamental error in the way that we as consumers regard and digest game reviews.
 
What I am about to tell you next has no accompanying reams of data or sucker punch statistics. It is not something I can derive or state to you with any level of mathematical confidence. It is a one hundred percent unsupported opinion, and all I can do in lieu of providing any numerical argument is to preface with two questions.
 
First question: Do these three scores represent the same quality of game?
 

 
Second question: What about these three?
 

 
A review cannot be objective because it is directly tied to a single human being’s experience at a specific point in time. A review should not be objective because entertainment is inherently a subjective experience. When I play a game, I could not care ****ing less if some evangelist has anointed it with the sweat from Christ’s armpit. I only care about how much fun the game is TO ME.
 
A review score can help me determine enjoyment to some extent, but it is ultimately supplemental to the actual written review. If some bro who loves hammering his dick into the ground with a cleat rates Dick Stompers 2012 a 9.5/10, I am going to be seriously mislead if I purchase on the grade alone. I can’t stand having my dick pulverized by spiky feet! And if the reviewer is worth his salt, he will give me the subjective context I need in the review proper to understand where my tastes overlap with and differ from his own and how those differences will affect my enjoyment of the game in question.
 
I care if you are a veteran of the genre. I care if you played the prequel. I care if you love the IP. I care if it was the story or the mechanics that made you dock that game a point. Hell, I even care if you had a shitty time. When Daniel published his Warhammer 40k: Space Marine review broken multiplayer and all or Colin devoted a quarter of his Half-Life 2 review to tell me how much he hated Steam, I said, “**** yeah, journalism”. Don’t give me the idyllic future; give me the information I need to figure out as best I can what my experience with this game is most likely going to be.
 
I’ve played modestly-scored games that I’ve loved and skipped highly rated games I knew I would hate, and I owe it all to that pointless garbage dumped between the game title and the score. So for the love of God, get to know your reviewer and read the review. Metacritic might cover the broad strokes, but chances are the review of that one game made for you and you alone is not punctuated by a perfect score.


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Why Does the Video Game Industry Hate Used Game Sales?
Posted on Saturday, September 17 2011 @ 16:38:49 Eastern

Seriously. What is the Big Fucking Deal?

Video game publishers (and by extension, video game developers) sell millions of copies of their games, and they have the audacity to complain about a few units lost to second-hand sales? Some people have said that, compared to the enormous number of pre-orders and day one sales for triple-A titles, retailers barely sell any used game products. Others have argued that used games that do get purchased are sold at a lower price than the new copies, which means that the retailers make less money on a used game sale than they do on a sale of the same game brand new. This, I am told, encourages retailers to sell new games over used—the second-hand games market is just a service to consumers. The video game industry, some say, keeps complaining because they are avaricious and stupid, churning out banal junk no one wants and then blaming used games for their poor sales numbers.

But why argue solely based on assumptions and hearsay? I, for one, think it’s high time that we, the loyal consumers of video game entertainment, pull back the curtain on the used games market.  Let’s reveal these publishers, developers, and hardware producers for what they are: a greedy, hegemonic entertainment-industrial complex trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the retailers and consumers that they purport to serve.

To analyze the used games market, we’ll look at real financial data from Gamestop, one of the most oft-cited retailers on the topic of second-hand game sales. All of the following data represents Gamestop’s 2010 full-year results and is publically available in Gamestop’s annual 10-K report.

Let’s start by looking at just how big the used games piece of retail pie actually is:



So of Gamestop’s $8.1 billion of video game-related sales in 2010, $2.4 billion came from used games and used game hardware. That’s 30.3% of video game-related sales coming from used game products… not exactly what I would call an insignificant portion of the market. Still! Gamestop is first and foremost a new games retailer. It’s not as though they’re making the majority of their money from second-hand sales.

Right?

The thing of it is: When we want to find out how much money is made by selling something, we can’t just look at the sales dollars—we also need to consider how much the sold item cost to create or, in the case of retailers, to purchase in the first place.

If I buy a boat for $499,000 and then turn around and sell it for $500,000, I haven’t actually cleared a cool half million. In fact, I’ve only made $500,000 - $499,000 = $1,000. This number is my gross profit—it’s the amount of money that I have earned on the sale, which I can then use to pay for common business expenses like labor, rent, utilities, travel, hookers, and blow, ultimately pocketing the final difference as earnings. For a game retailer, gross profit shows how much money was made off a video game sale after paying back the company or person the game was bought from in the first place. This is how Gamestop’s gross profit breaks down:



Holy ****.

What the hell happened to “selling at lower prices means lower profits?” According to these numbers, in 2010 Gamestop made more money selling used game products than it did selling new gaming hardware and software combined. 54.7% of Gamestop’s video game-related gross profits came from used game sales--Gamestop isn’t a game store that also carries used games, it is a pawn shop that also sells new products!

What’s going on here? How are these used games generating so much money?

To find out, we start by looking at the margin rate for used and new game sales. Margin rate measures the percentage of each sale Gamestop earns as profit. It answers the question, “If I could have one additional dollar of sales, what type of product would I want to have sold?”

To calculate margin rate, we take gross profit and divide by total sales. In the case of Gamestop, this gives us:



For cheap-ass second-handers, those are some valuable used games: Sales dollar for sales dollar, used game sales earn over DOUBLE the profit of new game sales. Put another way, if Gamestop had the choice of selling a $60 new game or a $60 used game, the used game wins hands down. In fact, Gamestop would rather sell a $50 used game than a $60 new game. And a $40 used game. And a $30 used game. If Gamestop had its way, it would not sell a single new $60 game until the price of the used game fell to just under $27.

But Gamestop doesn’t have to reduce used game prices to $27 in order to generate sales. Generating over one billion dollars in gross profit is as simple as a five dollar discount.



We know now that selling a used game is more profitable to Gamestop than selling a new game. We know that this profitability is coming from not just the ability to acquire used games more cheaply than new games, but to then sell those used games at a nearly identical price to the new. What we don’t yet know is, how? How is Gamestop able to sell $2.4 billion worth of used games while only offering such a slim discount?

To answer that question, we need to tap into broader economic theory. Pay attention; this is where things get interesting.

There is an important distinction between used video games and other second-hand markets: With video games, a used product acts as a near-perfect substitute for a new one. Unlike cars and furniture, which degrade with use, a “used” game disc is functionally identical to a disc fresh out of the factory. Spinning around inside a console, both process the same data, project the same images onscreen, and react the same way to inputs. This substitution effect confounds developers and publishers, who work for years through countless software iterations and millions of invested dollars to bring to market the best product they have the faculties to produce. Within twenty-four hours, a competing product appears, only this game required no up-front investment, received free advertising and marketing, and is identical to the first in all aspects except one: It is less expensive.

Let’s take all of the above as a given: The thriving used games market, the products, and the price points all exist the day that you, Joe Consumer, step into a Gamestop outlet. You’ve traded in all of your old games, and now you’re browsing the PS3 rack. Arkham City catches your attention—new for $59.99, or used for $54.99.

You glance back to the register; a grizzled father is demanding to know why Gamestop released a new DS two weeks after he bought his daughter the old one she no longer wants because it has “fewer ‘D’s”. You’ve got some time.

First question: Does $5 make the difference between purchasing Arkham City and leaving the store empty-handed? This is the “market expansion” argument—that the lower price of used games allows gamers to buy software they otherwise would not have. In the majority of cases, the answer will be no. There are new games available from sixty to ten dollars, suggesting that an inability for new games to meet frugal consumer price points is not the issue. In fact, Gamestop intentionally prices their used stock as close to the new as possible, so long as the remaining difference still registers psychologically with consumers as being a ‘discount’.

But damn it, WHY? Why doesn’t anyone see what’s happening here? If we all buy used, the gaming industry suffers. Can’t we all just band together and give that $2.4 billion back to be reinvested in making the games we enjoy?

Nope.

If one gamer were given the choice to fund the future of game development with that $2.4 billion in exchange for buying every game he played new, that single person might say, “Hey! Said $2.4 billion is going to fund a ton of great games that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and having the option to purchase all those future entertainment experiences is going to give ME much more happiness than a measly five bucks per game. I’ll definitely buy new, because in the long run, it will be the bigger benefit to ME.” But his decision to buy new doesn’t give $2.4 billion back to his favorite developers and publishers. It gives $40—enough money to buy a developer a foot-long sub instead of the usual six-incher for a couple weeks, but not enough to influence anything in the long run. The other $2.4 billion worth of customers are in the exact same position, and they are all thinking the exact same thing:

“It doesn’t make a difference.”

Consumers make decisions at the margin. Whether the other $2.4 billion is going to the publishers or to Gamestop, my $40 contribution will not make ANY difference on the state of the industry. And it IS an industry—we owe it nothing. If my $40 donation won’t bring ME happiness, then as a rational consumer, I have no reason to buy new. If there is no discernable difference in quality between the new and used product, I have no reason to buy new. But, if I were to perceive one otherwise identical product as having a discount in price over the other otherwise identical product, no matter how meager the true dollar difference may be…?

So we buy the used game. And then publishers and platform owners, in a desperate attempt to re-capture sales lost to their doppelganger competition, push pre-order bonuses and downloadable content and subscription services and microtransactions and map packs and digital distribution and online passes and games that can only be played once and any other method of product differentiation that a retailer can’t turn around and resell in the same ****ing box the publisher created to house their own product. And then consumers complain that the video game industry is greedy and stupid and bereft of creativity and building things that customers do not want. And the video game industry takes this criticism with as much stoic optimism as their PR teams can muster because shouting back, “It’s your own ****ing fault!” will not in any way bolster what new game retail sales are still being captured.

And that is why the video game industry hates used game sales.



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Game Revolution Exposed: Haiku Fridays biased in favor of veterans!
Posted on Friday, July 29 2011 @ 18:57:36 Eastern

Fuck Haiku Friday

A veteran-biased scam

I’ll prove it with math
 
Haiku Friday was birthed from the moist mind-womb of Duke Ferris on April 17, 2009.

Having acquired beta invites f...   read more...

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Game Revolution Exposed: Grade Padding Scheme Revealed!
Posted on Monday, May 9 2011 @ 11:35:41 Eastern

Gamerevolution.com has been a fixture in my life for over 10 years. I was around when the only way to enter the site was through a compacted car and the home page could fit on an 800x600 postage stamp.  I even remember when the mailbag was a wee...   read more...

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