It's the resellers' fault
Ah-hah. So now we know why innovation is being stifled in mainstream game development. It's not the cost of game development, the difficulty of marketing an innovative idea. It's not because EA tried to nix The Sims for YEARS before it was forced on them and allowed to make them rich as the best-selling PC game of all time. It's not that graphics technology has reached the point of diminishing returns such that 2-year-old games are no longer dwarfed by the appearance of their more recent cousins.

No. It's all because of those stores selling pre-owned games:

"However, if it continues to grow, it could potentially starve us of the funds
necessary for research and development, and therefore, developers will be less
willing to take a risk on new and genre-diversifying titles. It's this creative
diversity that makes the games industry so popular, and without sustained
funding from new software sales, this could be at risk."

That's right! Those stores selling secondhand games should be ashamed of themselves. If GameStop would simply stop selling used games, why, it would usher in a new golden age of innovation! EA would no longer keep foisting sequel after lackluster sequel, and we'd no longer see store shelves clogged with endless clones of 2-year-old hits! Gee, Sony really wants to innovate guys... please quit selling us used games so they can start innovating and taking risks on genre-diversifying titles!

Yeah, right.

The retail games industry is suffering the same kind of split-identity crisis that the DVD and recording industry seem to be in now. They want to live in the best of two different worlds: A service industry, and a product industry. They want the scaleability, ease and (relatively) low overhead of simply pushing out products, but they want to charge the customer and limit usage like a service industry.

I can't imagine Sony denying me the right to re-sell a television at a garage sale. Or a major book publisher claiming I can't re-sell or trade my book later to a secondhand book store - or loaning a book to a friend so he could read it. Yes, this cuts down on on potential sales revenue to the game creators, and as a guy who has made a living selling videogames this concerns me.

But you have to draw the line between the rights of the consumer and the rights of the producer, and I'd rather err on the side of the consumer. I don't think it adversely affects the "artist" as much as it affects the middlemen. The artist is potentially a brand - and if they produce more than one title, a satisfied purchaser of a secondhand title from that artist (be it a game studio, a band, an author, or whatever) may be more inclined to purchase new titles from that artist in the future.

At least that's how the theory works. In practice, game studios rarely achieve a solid identity and branding of their own, outside of the I.P. of their games (which is almost always owned by the publishers these days). The publishers work hard to commoditize the game studios, keeping them relatively unknown to the consumer, and making them interchangeable for the purpose of creating sequels. This isn't helped by the fact that games are such gigantic team efforts - teams which are constantly in flux. It's hard for a consumer's mind to fix on an identity for a team. It's analogous to movies, where consumers tend to fix on specific "star" actors, or less frequently directors. When was the last time you went to a movie because a particular cinematographer or casting director was involved?

Still, that doesn't change my initial argument. Secondhand game sales are good for the consumers. Without consumers, our industry withers and dies. The "first-sale doctrine" (which gives legitimate purchasers the right to re-sell a license to a copyrighted work without obtaining the permission of the original seller) actually reduces the risk the consumer takes when purchasing a title, as they know they can always sell it used later if they don't want to make it a permanent part of their collection. This means that, contrary to the unnamed Sony spokesperson, secondhand sales may actually INCREASE the ability to create innovative, genre-diversifying titles.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. For now. :)

Labels: Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:15 AM (Permalink)