The Game Industry doesn’t care about you selling your games. What animates them is removing competition. They hate how Gamestop can sell used games next to new games with the used games being ‘slightly cheaper’ than the new ones. And all the money goes to Gamestop.
There are many solutions to this. The way how PC gaming eliminated much of piracy was through amazing packaging. By including nice thick hundred page manuals, cloth maps, and various other booklets, there was strong, strong incentive to buy the NEW game. When the game experience stretched to beyond the digital, used games have little appeal. It is not unlike board games. Who wants a used board game with screwed up parts and messed up booklets? Yuck.
The Game Industry has systematically removed anything considered ‘packaging’ and focused entirely on a ‘game on a disc’. Then they seem shocked when consumers realize that digital components cannot get “used” like traditional packaging.
What if the Game Industry got its way? First, the used games would be gone. However, that is only the first step. The next stop afterward is to remove all former games on the market. They can say, “We are republishing X game and X game exists in used versions on older consoles. We are buying as much of this X game we can to remove it from the market so people have to get the recent version. We do this in the name of protecting our IP.” I can see a publisher saying that.
When the Virtual Console came to the Wii, a friend of Iwata (I believe) told him of a “problem”. He illustrated it by buying the Wii and nothing but Virtual Console games. “They don’t have to buy the main software.” And this is a problem since Nintendo has risk with the main software in retailer stores and that is where it primarily makes its money. Also, the Virtual Console software competes with the other software. Instead of buying Super Mario Galaxy, I purchased Super Mario Brothers 3 instead ( a much better game!). I suspect this is why Nintendo keeps trickling out the Virtual Console as it is about Nintendo trying to manage your spending for you.
This same thinking is probably multiplied by a thousand with the Game Industry. They don’t like competition. All these small, little games are a problem. Indie games are a problem. A good way to remove this competition is to increase legal legislation so small games and small developers cannot compete.
The entire purpose for the Game Industry to keep pushing the AAA big budget model is to eliminate competition. Gaming used to be where anyone in a garage could make a game and have it be competitive. Today, that is no longer the case. You need hundreds of artists, half a decade or more, and hundreds of millions of dollars to make a ‘competitive game’. The ‘Middle Class’ of game companies have been destroyed much to the Game Industry’s great joy. Less competition for them. Activison and EA get to cannibalize their markets as they get bigger and make more money.
The Game Industry’s business strategy is to eliminate competition. While all this ‘even better graphics’ at millions of dollars of expense, with massive teams, and now with all these online components of ‘cloud gaming’- these are not bad business decisions but intentional ones to eliminate and destroy competitors. If things keep going the way they are decades from now, we will only have one third party company left: probably Activision. It is like gaming is going in reverse and we have re-entered the Atari Era again. (Perhaps we can take a cue from M.U.L.E. and call these backwards-to-Atari direction Irata which is Atari spelled backwards. “The industry’s strategy isn’t bad, it is just Irata.” It is close to ‘irrational’.)
Why is the Nintendo console a problem? It is because Nintendo software is a competitor. However, in double-speak fashion, this is not the case for Nintendo handhelds. It is because there is only one handheld with no real competitors.
Remember all that talk about the desire for ‘one console’? Game Industry hates competition.
As gamers, we LOVE competition. Competition makes better games. But as competition is drained away from the market, the games increasingly become mediocre despite their skyrocketing budgets.
Remember when anyone could make a sports game? That was before EA cornered the licensing for the profession sports. Game Industry hates competition.
Ask yourself, “What can the Game Industry do to eliminate competition next?” and you will predict the next move of the Game Industry.