Silent_Buddha
Legend
Exactly, that's what I've been saying with regards to the Book market. It hurts, but on its own it doesn't hurt the book market as badly as it does the console market.
For used books there's a large difference between a used book and a new book, especially if the used book is old and has been passed around a lot. I take excellant care of my physical books but overtime even with the best of care, the paperbacks start to get brittle, the glue in the binding starts to get brittle, the pages start to yellow, etc. It's basically incentive to buy new rather than used.
With used game copies up until recently there was almost zero benefit or incentive to buy new other than to have the game on Day 1. If they game has been out a week or two. Whether you buy new or buy used, you get the exact same product with no quality differences.
The same could be said of music CDs and movie DVDs/BRDs. But unlike music and movies, books and console games don't usually have merchandising revenue or live performance revenue in the case of music artists. There's obviously the rare cases. The Japanese market in Japan with game related merchandise or mega games like Blizzard games. But by and large in the western markets a developer and publishers success is dependant solely on new games sales and nothing else.
Hence, why the used market hurts console game developers and publishers far more than it does the book, music, or movie industry.
Whether something is good or bad is entirely up to which viewpoint you hold. For consumers it's generally good as they can get a great deal if they wish to wait for it.
For game retailers it's a good thing as well. If not for used games (incredibly high margins) they would be out of business with the razor thin margins available with the consoles games and hardware due to publishers trying to keep prices as low as possible.
For developers and publishers its often quite bad. Especially for the smaller developers and smaller and/or niche games which are already less likely to have a blockbuster hit that can more than make up for any used game losses. So Infinity Ward was probably not affected much by used game sales other than just not making as much as they could have otherwise. So buckets of cash is still buckets of cash. On the other hand you have developers like Pandemic Studios which ceased to exist soon after sales of their game turned out to be disappointing. Most developers are operating near the line that if crossed leads you to going out of business and being shut down like Pandemic rather than not being affected by market variations like Infinity Ward or even Treyarch.
Every used copy that is sold is money they can't use to recoup their initial investment or invest into a new game. And in many ways it's even worse than pirating. A common excuse for pirating is that they never would have bought the game anyway, so a developer never would have seen the money anyway (I think this is a load of BS, but whatever).
On the other hand someone that bought a used copy was obviously willing to buy the game. Probably not at full price, but eventually the game prices go down and at some point a new copy will be similarly priced to a used copy although it may take months longer to reach that point than the week or two or four for a used copy. So in this case, someone is certainly paying money for the game that you, as a developer, spent the past X years making...but you aren't seeing single a single penny from those sales for those X years of effort.
Speaking of which, that's where going purely digital distribution will have huge benefits. If we use Steam's digital distribution history as an example. We see that games quite often start to hit used game sale prices in a matter of weeks/months. Not having to deal with recouping investment in physical duplication, packaging, shipping, retail agreements, etc. means that they can start putting games on sale for lower prices much sooner than you can with physical retail games.
Regards,
SB
