Opinion
The Disc Is Not Enough
In their efforts to offset used game sales, publishers may be missing an opportunity to turn players into viral marketers, argues N'Gai Croal.
The CEO of a major publisher once told me that he wasn’t opposed to used games, but rather what he perceived as the low trade-in value that GameStop offered, resulting in large profit margins for the retailer and nothing to the publisher or the development team. And several game developers I know are sanguine about the whole thing, seeing it from the points of view of both the civilian game fans they used to be, trying to stretch each dollar as far as it could go, and that of the industry veterans they’ve become, knowing that each dollar in used game sales is a dollar that they and their peers may be denied.
It’s equally interesting to contrast this hostility towards used sales with the efforts game publishers have made to increase the average selling price of their titles. From plastic instruments to multiple special editions of games, publishers have left no stone unturned when it comes to extracting money from consumers. Things like night-vision goggles aside, the seeds for this strategy were sown in the previous generation of consoles, when sizable numbers of gamers would pay the $10 extra for a ‘special edition’ version with some trinket or bonus thrown in. So when the first wave of Xbox 360 titles debuted at $60, I wasn’t surprised given the clearly demonstrated willingness of gamers to pay an extra $10.
However, in fairness to publishers and developers, the average selling price of games has not kept pace with inflation. During the era of the 16bit console, it wasn’t uncommon to spend $70 or more for a cartridge. So in that sense, today’s pricing is a discount even if it doesn’t always feel much like it. But when you factor in the rising cost of game development, it’s easy to see why publishers are looking at a number of ways to recoup and ultimately profit from their investment.
This is where EA’s Project Ten Dollar comes in. I first noticed it in an NBA Live game that had been sent to me while I was still writing for Newsweek. Rather than immediately jump online, I had to enter a code that would let me access the game’s online features. But if for some reason I hadn’t been in possession of the code, I would have to pay an additional fee in order to do so. And even though many of the ramifications of this were immediately clear, I wasn’t perturbed by it in the slightest. After all, I was the first ‘purchaser’ of the game; I was in possession of the required code. And that’s the first key to a strategy like Project Ten Dollar: to drive a wedge between people who buy their games new and those who buy them used by maintaining (or increasing) the value of the game at first sale and driving down the value of the game for any subsequent purchasers.
This practice began to make its way into other EA titles like Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, sweetened with the carrot of free bonus content. THQ followed suit with its UFC-licenced game. Meanwhile, executives at other publishers, like Ubisoft, have been indicating their interest in establishing similar initiatives at their own companies. And on the surface, it looks like a win for all concerned, with additional content (like the Flashback Map Pack for Gears Of War 2) to the first purchaser that, presumably, he or she would not have otherwise received.
The challenge with these initiatives, however, is that the redeem-code-for-multiplayer-and-bonus-content is a blunt instrument with which to beat back used game retailers. If I want to, say, lend my copy of UFC Unlimited to a friend, he or she must purchase a new code in order to play multiplayer. That hardly seems fair. And this doesn’t even cover digital distribution, which often fails to allow any sharing options in its default state. In my opinion, publishers should approach this entire issue with more carrot and less stick. Rather than look at their consumer as someone who just wants to blaze through the game as quickly as possible and sell it for GameStop dollars, they should look at their customers as carriers who could infect other gamers with enthusiasm for the title in question, which could in turn lead to increased sales.
If word of mouth is the biggest driver of sales, why not give anyone who completes the game’s campaign the ability to unlock additional codes that they can share with their friends to access an extended campaign co-op demo? Or 48 hours of access to multiplayer? The connected world we live in doesn’t just let publishers solve perceived problems, it creates intriguing opportunities that smart publishers should take advantage of in order to turn gamers into allies rather than adversaries.