David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments, says retail outlets that buy and sell pre-owned games are “essentially defrauding the industry.” Although multiplayer gaming might not be a huge threat, the single player experience in games may die out because gamers play the game quickly and resell it back to places like GameStop for others to buy.
Developers don’t get a dime when a game goes traded, many gamers will “share” the single player experience with a single copy of the game by reselling it over and over. The end result, retail outlets make a good penny for marking up old games while developers see nothing. This is really how game retail outlets survive because the margins on video games is so damn low.
The story has been heard before, developers want a piece of the action so they’re taking steps to entice people to keep the game with renewed downloadable content on old games; you can’t experience the new content without keeping the game around longer. In the world of low margin games, high cost development and short-lived story lines the solutions to this problem aren’t exactly obvious.
Braben’s idea of a solution is to offer two versions of the game, a not for resale/rental version at a high price, say $160, and a low priced version that cannot be shared (heavily DRM’ed?) for $50. In essence, gamers would no longer be able to trade in games because the idea of spending double for a game so you can resell it makes no sense to most gamers (including myself.)
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Hi guys.
As always: thanks for the episode, it was fun to listen to it 🙂
Regarding your topics in this episode:
I am very hyped for the new Atari console, but i can´t describe why. Maybe because the Atari 2600 was my first console as a kid, and i am a little bit nostalgic? The new one looks good, but as Jonah mentioned: the console will rise or fall with the games and they did not show anything right now (or i did not see anything).
I never played Ys as a kid, because as far as i know, the are not available in german, and as a kid, i was not able to understand english 🙂 The bumping mechanic seems a little bit awkward, but on the other hand it´s something different to everything else 🙂 I saw some videos about the newer versions of Ys (PS4 releases). Did one of you play them/one of them and can tell me, if one of them is worth playing?
I play Fortnite on PC sometimes with my friends. I did not bought the game, so i only can play the battle royal part and this is fun to me, if i play it with friends. I also played it on my mobile … for 2 minutes … its unplayable in my opinion … as expected 🙂 But if you want to play a round on PC with Discord or TeamSpeak to coordinate, let me know. My ingame Name is the same as here : Jackosis.
I have one question to all 3 of you: are you thinking about streaming some gaming of you or do YouTube Videos? Some kind of Let´s Plays or sth like that? I think it´s more work, so i don´t know if you would have the time for that 🙂
And for the OffTopic: right now i am into the a very old series: SpinCity with Michael J Fox (in germany its called Chaos City … don´t ask me why) and i started watching The Walking Dead.
I wish you a great week and a happy easter weekend and hope to get a new episode very soon 🙂
greetings from germany,
Ralf