Console gaming has come a long way since I started playing the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) with my brother when we were children. I’ve been through a NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Playstation, Playstation 2, Xbox, Wii, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360; yet I don’t think there has been more anticipation for a new console generation than there is for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One releases in November.
Where will this generation take us? There has been so much hype, so much drama, so many back and forth conversations between gamers stating which console will be better. The problem is that, there isn’t a lot changing in the world of console gaming. YES, I know, there are all sorts of things changing, but look outside of the fact that there are new consoles with better graphics; things aren’t changing that much when it comes to the things that really NEED to change.
Gamestop and used games: The Bane of My Existence
Gamestop is a test in futility. For some reason, I always end up going back expecting a different result and the same thing happens over and over – you don’t get anywhere near what you think you are going to get for your games.
You might as well think of your games as a new car when you buy them from Gamestop. They always say when you buy a new car that as soon as you drive off the dealer’s lot it has lost half its value; it seems like when it comes to Gamestop, as soon as you take the shrink wrap off your games they have lost half the value as well. For example, Grand Theft Auto V came out on September17th, 2013 and today is October 17th, 2013. When I look at the trade in value for GTA V, you would get $27 or $29.70 if you are a PowerUp Rewards member – Half the price of what you initially paid for the game.
Ok, they are a business and need to make a profit, and when you sell a game new, the profits are small because there are portions of those sales that go back to the publisher of the game. When Gamestop sells a game used they are hoping that it will go in and out of the store like a revolving door. Using GTA V as an example again, a used copy of GTA V right now is $54.99, so trading in a copy of GTA V nets Gamestop $25 in profit the first time that the game gets re-sold.
BUT…like I previously said, Gamestop is hoping that each copy of that game will go in and out of the store like a revolving door. They want the person who bought the used copy to subsequently trade that game in to get something else, because every time that copy of the game is re-sold to someone else, after you subtract the trade in value, the next time it sells that game is all profit.
The Gamestop Blowback: DLC and Micro Transaction
You might be wondering why this is bad. You don’t play such-and-such game anymore, and it will just sit on a shelf somewhere until maybe you pick it up and play it again at some point. Why shouldn’t you get something in return for it?
That is great for you in the short term, but years of this happening have had adverse effects on the gaming industry. All of those extra dollars that Gamestop rakes in are dollars that don’t make it to the game publishers/developers. The development and marketing of games has become extremely expensive. Again to use GTA V as an example, it set a record for the most expensive game to be made at $266 million dollars. They obviously recouped the cost by making $1 billion dollars in three days, but this isn’t the norm. Games like the Tomb Raider reboot and Splinter Cell: Blacklist are just a couple of titles that didn’t reach their target sales.
For publishers/developers, they had to look at other methods to make up the sales gap that used game sales take away. Two things that have come around over the years, one that has been happening for a while and one that is relatively new, are downloadable content and micro transactions. Now, even if Gamestop and the sales of used games didn’t have an impact on game sales, someone at a major publisher would have probably come up with these ideas at some point, but would they have been as prevalent as they are?
Call of Duty is a great example of a game with downloadable content, and a lot of it. Each year there is a new Call of Duty game, and each your there are new multiplayer maps that come out in DLC over the life of the game. This past year with Call of Duty: Black Ops II there were four DLC packs that came out. If you bought each DLC separately, they cost $15 a piece ($60 total) OR when the game first came out you could have bought the season pass for $50 (saving you $10).
Micro transactions are a completely different beast. It’s a way for you to buy items within a game using real money. This is something that a lot of Free-To-Play games live off of. League of Legends wants you to buy riot points to shop in their store and buy champions, skins, etc. But this isn’t just Free-To-Play games anymore, major releases are adding in micro transactions as well. Call of Duty: Black Ops II added micro transactions called “personalization packs” that allowed you to put new skins on your weapons, and this is for a game that most people won’t be playing after Call of Duty: Ghosts comes out in November.
When you think about it, if you buy a game like Call of Duty, AND the season pass, AND a personalization pack or two (because we all need a bacon wrapped rocket launcher) you end up spending twice the amount of what the game actually costs.
Game Marketing: Everything and the Kitchen Sink
Now, all of these extra costs for the consumer aren’t just due to used game sales. Now-a-days, big triple A titles means big marketing campaigns. Activision spends ungodly amounts of money promoting Call of Duty on a yearly basis, and these costs for the marketing get factored into the overall cost of making the game. So, when a developer stated that they spent X dollars making a game, this will include the cost of the marketing campaigns.
In November, Call of Duty: Ghosts comes out, which means that Activision will be spending an exorbitant amount of money promoting the game. They took part in the Xbox One reveal event to do a reveal of the Single player portion of the game, they did a separate Multiplayer reveal event, and they are doing a tour to show off the game. When they did the multiplayer reveal event, every person in attendance found out they were going to receive a copy of the prestige edition of the game for free. They also announced that during their tour, the first 500 people at each location to try Call of Duty: Ghosts would be receiving the prestige edition for free. Now put all of this on top of the TV commercials, billboards, posters, and other promotional material…Activision is spending MILLIONS. These millions spent of marketing are part of the reason why game prices have stayed at $60 when Playstation 4 and Xbox One come out in November.
The Future NEEDS to be totally digital content
So, why do we perpetuate the situation? What needs to change in the console gaming market to make things better? How do games get cheaper, publishers/developers get more money from sales, and gamestop no longer offers you pennies of the dollar for your games?
LOOK TO PC GAMING TO LEAD THE WAY!
Yes, PC gaming is all about digital content from places like Steam or Origin. When you buy something, it’s yours; there is no selling of used PC games anymore. This means that portions of all the sales of the games are going to the publishers/developers. This allows Steam to have crazy sales sometimes at 70% off the cost of the game.
I’ve gotten some pretty good deals from Games on Demand on Xbox Live (Borderlands 2 for $9.99), but those deals are few and far between when it comes to console gaming. Yes after a while you can get someone of a good deal on digital copies of games, but they still aren’t as good of deals as what you can find on PC.
At one point it felt like this was going to change for console gaming. When Microsoft first announced their policies for Xbox One (yes, THOSE policies that most people freaked out about), it felt like they were working in the right direction. Not a lot of people saw it this way, mostly because we are humans, and humans for the most part hate change (look at how the PC community first acted when Steam came around – THEY HATED IT). When I looked at what they wanted to do, it felt like console gaming was going to be evolving into something closer to what PC gaming did, and even though it was scary I was looking forward to it.
Microsoft’s cloud service for Xbox One opened up a lot of doors. In their original policies whether you bought a physical copy or digital copy of a game, you always had access to your game collection and could play the games from the cloud on any other Xbox One. Once they did the policy 180, the only part of that changed was that if you bought a digital copy of a game, then you could access it from the cloud on any other Xbox One.
Look at most other entertainment mediums. Barnes and Noble are closing physical stores left and right because everyone has a kindle or nook. I can’t name a physical store that strictly sells music anymore because how many people are actually buying CD’s when you can download an entire album in minutes from itunes? Movies are probably one of the few things that actually still do well selling a physical copy, but that may be short lived as well. My cable provider actually releases most movies on demand the same day they come out on DVD/Bluray, so unless it’s something I know I am going to be watching over and over, I’ll just rent it digitally from my cable company for a couple days.
Eventually games (Yes, even console games) are going to go the route of completely digital content. This might not fix all the things I’ve brought up, but think about this: If all console games were digital, really what does Gamestop have to offer you? Maybe PS3 or Xbox 360 games? Would game publishers/developers be happier because they would make more from their games? Would it help to possibly lower the initial price of a game, and make the prices drop quicker?
The biggest issue right now with going to a fully digital medium is one of the same issues that Microsoft ran into when they announced their “Always Online” policy – the internet sucks in a lot of places. Internet speeds are getting better since Google Fiber decided to show just how fast things could be, but there are people out there that don’t feel that people want faster internet. Back in February Irene Esteves, CFO of Time Warner Cable, said that people don’t really want the internet speeds that Google fiber is offering. Well, in a world heading in the direction of having full digital content, why wouldn’t we want download speeds to be at their fastest? With more and more companies moving to using Cloud services, wouldn’t it be nice to purchase a game, and stream it instead of having to download it onto your console or run it from a disc?
You May Say I’m a Dreamer, But I’m Not the Only One
Who knows, maybe I live in a fantasy world. Do I want dogs and cats to live together without causing mass hysteria? Possibly, though I’m not really a cat person. Do I want all the Gamestop employees around the world to lose their jobs? No, because nobody deserves that. What I want is gaming to be as simple as possible. I want to be able to pre-load every new game I purchase on my console(s) prior to the midnight they come out, that way when 12am hits, I can start playing and not have to worry about how fast a line is moving. I want to be able to lend a game to a friend like I can do with a book from my kindle, they can instantly download it, and when they are done it comes back to my account for me to play it again. I don’t want to have to worry about whether my disc drive will burn out, or if my hard drive is getting too full.
Take a hint from the PC gamers, books, and music because digital content is where console gaming is heading so get used to the idea of change now before it happens. It might not happen right away, but eventually it will. When I look at the differences between PC gaming and console gaming it feels like modern man vs cave man. They have guns with bullets and eat out at fancy restaurants, while us console gamers have pointy sticks that also are very helpful when cooking our meat over open fire. Disc based gaming is an archaic method, just like how cartridge gaming before it. Console gaming needs to move forward with the time and adapt to a changing world before it is left behind.
Think about this, just because someone invents something or does it well, doesn’t always mean they will be the ones that do it best. Most of the time, the best way something is done is by someone modifying something that already exists and makes it better. What I’m trying to say is, take the things that PC gaming has taught us that work, and apply it to console gaming. There may be resistance at first, but when you look through history there has always been resistance to change. Change isn’t easy, but eventually the majority of people will adapt to it and embrace it.
The post The State of Console Gaming: What is bad, what needs to change, and what the future (might) hold appeared first on sai tyrus.
