Stratis User Info

July 17, 2009 1:34:48 PM

I believe the article is partly right and partly wrong. Instead of criticizing it in detail I will try to briefly describe my point of view:

The price of a game has to be between the minimum a seller is willing to give it away (roughly the costs of producing the disk and box) and the maximum a buyer is willing to pay. The later value is different for every single consumer.

Ideally a seller would like to ask every consumer for his willingness to pay and charge him that amount. Since this is not possible, publishers employ different strategies to get as much out of the consumers as possible, like selling games at a high price initially and reducing the price over time or selling expensive CE's.

Now every form of shared usage, be it sharing a game between friends or trading it in, hampers these strategies, as players gain access to a game for a much lower price than they would be willing to pay if they needed to.

Considering this during the initial price determination limits the effects to a certain degree, but does not offset them completely.

It also does not help much that some of the saved money is spent on other games, as it costs additional money to make these games.

In effect publishers make less money out of a single game than they could without a secondary market. This might sound like a good deal to players, but also reduces the financial viability of intensive single player games with high production values.

Consider this analogy: High budget movie titles would be impossible to make if they could only be published on DVD. Only because the can be sold through cinemas, forcing every single moviegoer to pay for a non shareable ticket, they become financially viable.

However, as long as the game sharing happens through GS, publishers could easily counter its effects by simply raising the price for Gamestop, arguing that they have a right to receive a bigger share of GS`s double turnover. If they do not, this is simply a question of their bargaining power.