I thought Crackdown sucked ass, so I am not surprised they only broke even. Plus, we all know GameStop has amazing used sales, but we also know that GameStop is amazing and pushing reserves on its customers... which lead to NEW game sales. So, get off the hate train!1111111 cHooo CHochO HcochCHOOOO

I bought it new!

...for $10 off of NewEgg a while back. Does that count?

I try not to buy used games. It's impossible to do when you can't find the game new anymore...but that's a given.

But if a company isn't going to give us a reason to buy the game new, some people are going to get the game used so they can save a few bucks. Take a look at what Atlus is doing; almost every game they are releasing comes with something. An art book, CD, a little figure. Throw something in with the game, people will feel more compelled to buy it.

I was honestly going to wait to buy Overlord II used, but when I heard they were including a minion figurine...I caved. I'm a sucker for free crap.

With games going for $80 new here in Canada, expect resales to climb. Not exactly smart business in this economy.

Also, if that means Crackdown broke even then Infamous and Killzone are hurting too. This really does suck. I guess a OnLive type of console would be the best for developers.

Why don't publishers just open up their OWN retail stores? EA has one.

The developer seems to have a "were all in this together as gamers" thing going on. As if, he's our mate and he's, like, made a game Dude, go buy it...new.

What he is forgetting that we may all be enrhusiasts but we are also consumers and if we can get a game for cheaper then we will regardless of how much sympathy or love we have for a particular studio.

Perhaps they should put games out cheaper from the off which would boost sales on well reviewed games AND undercut the difference in price between new and used. Given the choice of $20 for a copy covered in 12 year olds fingerprints or $25 for a new sealed copy then I know what I would choose.

Also if you need to ship 1.5 million copies JUST to break even then it is not used games that are to blame it's the size of teams that need to be adressed.

Poor bloke. Without a beat key and in the current economic climate I doubt that Crackdown 2 will fare even as poorly as Crackdown.

They should ban used game sales and HALVE the price of new games.

I refuse to pay £40 or even £50 for a game that I'm not 100% sure about. If I'm 100% sure, i'll pre-order and buy new but generally I check the used racks and pick up whatever takes my interest for like £10/£15.

it's like the piracy argument, "every download / copy is a sale lost" - It's not! Used sales are sales to people who will only pay a lower price for your product, at full price they generally wouldn't have bought it, so it's not a lost fucking sale because of used games, it's a lost sale because it's too fucking expensive!

Lower your game prices. I'll buy less used games.

You are right, Doc. 1.5 million is damn good consider the game was only on 360. Perhaps they should look at spreading to other formats if Crackdown done well enough on 360.

I care not if you port Crackdown onto PS3, as PS3 owners get another cool game and you'll make more money. But don't go waving that used games bs around.

There's a margin GameStop has to mind when offering credit for used games. If the price (or really, value) of a new game went down, the value of a trade-in would have to go down with it, and the amount of store credit generated would have to go down even lower than that. I think lowering prices would dramatically reduce most of the incentive to want to trade in so many games - you'd probably have to trade in five or ten JUST to cover the cost of ONE used or new game.

So, I'm with the "lower the prices" crowd, as well as the "offer extras with new copies" crowd.

yeah, i don't know what makes games soooo SPECIAL ENOUGH to PROHIBIT EVIL CORPORATE POISONING [u] RESALES. [/u] i think it's because the gaming community as a whole is full of whiners.

I mean, i buy clothes from goodwill. Are clothing companies going to sneer and turn up their noses at me now? oh heavens no!

I bought Crackdown used a while back. It was one of the first 360 games I bought along with GRAWR 2, got them both in 2 for £30 deal at Gamestation. Both really good games.

I don't tend to sell my games on afterwards simply because I can't be arsed with the hassle of ebay and I don't think you really get a fair price when you trade games in to a shop.

@zer0faults um.... OR NOT. Are you insane? I thank God everyday that we dont live in your convoluted world.

While I despise Gamestop and its business policies they do provide a very useful and frankly needed service. I generally shop at alternate resale game shops if I can but this is the height of lunacy to expect someone who bought something from someone else to then pay an additional percentage to a 3rd party when they resell it. That would be the same as if you had to pay a car co for reselling your car. Its patently ridiculous and thankfully quite against the law.

@ChainThrow, JACK of No Trades, Dnky666, Dr Perscitus

Seriously. Calling out used game sales for your financial troubles rather than your astronomical development budget is really ignoring the elephant sitting on your bed. I thought one million was this major benchmark, a badge that signified out-of-the-ballpark financial success. Realtime Worlds is an independent studio and Crackdown was its first official game. How much money do they think they can throw around as an unproven developer? They need to seriously scale back.

How about they just shut up because used sales are a fact of life. All businesses have them.

So here's the interesting part. People are going to push digital download as a way to kill the evil used games market and suddenly realize, without the ability to transfer rights, their current price point is bankrolled by used games. There are many people who buy new and resell for $30 in store credit. To them, they are spending $30 a game. The people who wait for the price drop are spending $20-30 a game.

I would be willing to bet that there are few people who will keep on buying at the current price. In effect, if they do this, they will be raising their prices on almost everyone during a deflationary recession. We can watch the tide roll out them then and there.


...and, if you take 1.5 million games, a hearty feat, to break even, then your business model is wrong. Period. This industry will collapse under its own weight; it has to with the current budgets and market fragmentation.

As a publisher I would be wholeheartedly for Digital DL's. As a consumer Im very torn. Its incredibly convient but then it totally robs me of first sale rights. On the whole I would have to say that as long as game co's are charging 60+ dollars for a new game they are basically ENCOURAGING people to buy used.

excuses.

If you purchased Crackdown used you may as well have kidnapped a woman from her family, burned down her house as she watched her loved ones suffer, held a gun up against her head and blown her brains out.

Buying used games = murder. What I described above happens every time you buy used....probably.

As a businessman and soon-to-be MBA graduate, I find it amazing that Jim Sterling, a journalist who writes about video games for a living, has more business sense than some of the so-called business leaders in the video game industry.

"The games industry is a business. Businesses have competition. Publishers need to man up and compete with used games, not just sit back and whine because they're not making an extra million dollars."

I could not have said it better. That is the reason the music industry has been killed...because it whined and cried about people illegaling downloading music over the internet and tried to take everyone to court instead of figuring out "What can we do to make it worthwhile for the consumer to buy the music".

I will buy Crackdown 2 first hand, first because is awesome, second to make them shut up.

"Jim, you should interview some of these publishers and put them in their place. Great read I would imagine. Although they would probably be too pussy to debate it."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

And Jim and wouldn't be to pussy to do it?

Please, he talks a lot of shit because nobody from the industry responds back to him.

"After the beta ended, I saw shelves upon shelves of Crackdown at every game store I went into."

Bingo.

I loved Crackdown, had an absolute blast playing through it twice, hunting for all the orbs and all that shit, but I bought it used, and I only decided to buy the DLC because it was on sale, so all in all, I spent less than 20 dollars for the complete experience. Awesome for me. Not so much for Realtime.

However, if I could have purchased the game new for around 20 bucks (over a year after it was released, mind you), they would have gotten my money. But I couldn't, so they didn't. Point being, those talking about aggressive price adjustments throughout the life of the title are spot on. Games stagnating at 40-60 buck price points when they're well past their prime simply will not sell.

You don't even need to give people one-time DLC out of the box or a swanky figurine (although those are fine incentives), just don't ask folks to pay 60 bucks for a 6 month-old game of negligible quality with 10 hours of gameplay and zero replay value. And if you do, don't dare whine when people sell it back to GameStop for a slight return on their purchase so that they can reinvest it in another game, possibly new to boot.

"just curious how much business and/or game industry (either developer or publisher) experience Jim has."

His points are relevant, regardless. The perspective of the consumer is the only applicable perspective here, as other industries have survived alongside secondhand markets for decades just fine. Frankly - and I mean this in the nicest possible way - it doesn't matter what pubs and devs think. They want more money. There is literally nothing more to it than that, so don't allude to supposed complexities that require firsthand knowledge of the business/industry.

@Frohike Cutting game price will only make people EXPECT lower price for used game.

I think digital distribution AT LOWER PRICE POINT is awesome.