SydLexia.com - The Forums :: View topic - Sony has a new plan to shutdown used games.

Posted: Feb 19 2010 05:04 pm

Douche McCallister wrote:

Do some analysis on the trade in market and you might agree. If Gamestop is going to offer .75 for a game and turn around and sell it for $5-7 there is an extreme issue in pricing. There is a difference between making profit and being greedy. Gamestop knows this yet they still refuse to do anything about it because competition in the gaming market is to small to make them "have" to change. If a game comes out new and is $50 it should never be sold for anything more than $39.99 ever, typically it was $44.99-47.99 when I used to work there but I digress.

Greed aside, if the market will support those prices, that's what the shop will sell them for.

Likewise I hate that the UFC charges $49.99 for each Pay-Per-View, especially since they have one every month, and the quality of the fights is often hit or miss. But obviously enough people WILL pay it that they won't lower the price.

Posted: Feb 19 2010 05:05 pm

The last time I was in a Gamestop, I was looking for a copy of BorderLands with my friend. They had one, for $55. I called GameCrazy, and they were out, but had it for $45. Another game store also had it for $45. I informed the dude at the counter, asking if he could price match so I didn't have to drive all the way out there. He told me to get out.

Good store.

Posted: Feb 19 2010 05:08 pm

lol thats crap

Joined: Oct 01 2009 Posts: 5316

Yep...exactly why I don't bother going there. I don't even think they offer you a "try it, buy it, deny it" deal like a lot of other places do. If you buy a game there, you're basically stuck with it unless you want to sell it back in for a very small fraction of what you paid.

What saddens me the most, is it's owned by the same people who own Barnes and Noble, which I've never had a problem with.

2010 SLF Tag Champ Joined: Jun 07 2006 Posts: 12294

V.B.D. wrote:

Everytime I've considered buying a used game from gamestop, the new copy was only $3-5 more. I'll gladly pay that small premium to ensure I get a sealed copy with all the pack in content the game was meant to come with. It's almost insulting when they ask me if I want a used copy for literally a couple dollars less. Their discrepancy between buy back and used game prices is absurd. I know they have to make a profit, but seriously anybody who trades in games there is either lazy, desperate or just plain retarded. It's also bullshit when they try passing the opened store display copy as a "new" game. I refuse to pay full price for an opened copy that's probably been rented out by every other employee in the store. So yea, in short, fuck gamestop.

a new game that just came out is sixty dollars. a used copy of a game that just came out is fifty five. using the edge card saves you another ten percent, knocking the price of that game down to fifty dollars. when they have a sale like "buy two, get one free" you can buy two used games, for fifty dollars each, and then get a third game for free. You just saved eighty dollars by buying used over new.

on top of that, used games have a 7 day grace period where you can get your money back, and a month for even exchange. that means you can buy a game, try it, and if you don't like it, you have a month to get a game that you'd rather have. New games have no such policy. once you crack that shrink wrap, you own that game whether it sucks or not, just like any other store that sells new games.

Gamestop employees can only "rent" USED games, and even then, only if we have more than one copy in the store. "Gutted" games go straight into the drawer and aren't touched again until someone buys that copy. I understand how you feel on this particular subject, but as much as dislike buying a game that was already opened, I understand that the alternative is to put the sealed boxes out on the floor, which would of course lead to massive shoplifting problems. Also, buying a "gutted" game grants you the same return policy that the used games have, even though it's new.

Posted: Feb 20 2010 06:55 am

Ice2SeeYou wrote:

I'm personally ok with having games be DL only, except for the fact that I don't want to be fucked if my hard drive crashes. I'd be all for it if they institute some sort of program where after you've downloaded the game, you are entitled to re-download it again for life. I know there would be issues with preventing people from downloading to multiple systems and such, but there's got to be a way to work around that.

Steam and D2D already do that. Once you buy a game from them, you get the right to download it again for life. With Steam, the game is tied to your account so if you did install it on a friend's computer, he'd have to use your Steam account which means you couldn't.

Games going download only are the future. It's cheaper for the manufacturers, easier for the consumer, and more convenient. Physical discs and manuals and cardboard boxes are unnecessary and will soon become another footnote in our primitive computing history.

Quote:

It's not GameStop who's getting fucking over, it's you, the consumer. You know that game you bought and didn't quite like enough to want to keep? Well, now there's absolutely no secondary market for it. You know that game you kinda wanted to try, but were hesitant buy? Well, now it's either buy it as MSRP or don't buy it at all.

I don't consider Gamestop's existence to be a great boon of humanity. There's no secondary market there either if they're only offering 10% or less of what a game is worth. Again, the PC has been doing it this way for a long time now and it hasn't been a problem. If you buy a PC game you don't like, well, that's the risk you take. There's no reason though to blindly buy any game these days with as much information as there is on the internet about every single game. Just do some research and you won't get fucked. Why should it be different for console games?

If you're hesitant and unsure about buying a game, wait a few months until it goes on sale. Games usually halve in price after 3 months or so. That's what I do.

I don't understand what the problem is when this has been standard procedure for PC games for over 15 years. The used console game market only exists so Gamestop can rip stupid people off. If Sony takes that away, Gamestop suffers, not the consumer. Gamefly will be fine because no one downloads DLC for a rented game anyway. Also, if you care so much about displaying your games collection, you won't be selling many of them, so why do you care if there's no used game market?

Posted: Feb 20 2010 07:36 am

When I say "no secondary market", I don't mean just GameStop. I mean absolutely no secondary market. No Craigslist, no eBay, no selling the game to your friend.

Also, the game price cuts we see this days generally only happen because games get overproduced and companies need to clear out their stock and make back their production costs. If everything was DLC, there would be no production costs, and there would be less incentive for price drops. We would see price drops take longer to happen and be smaller in size.

"But Steam puts stuff on sale!"

Yes. Yes they do. But how many of those games were exclusive to Steam? How many of those games were never sold in a physical box? Few, if any.

And I care if there's a used games market because I buy games on it.

Posted: Feb 20 2010 08:53 am

You know one reason I like Steam?

Deals like this:
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/2539/

Let's see a B&M store offer something like this.

Joined: May 22 2008 Location: Goshen, VA Posts: 6544

Dude, there are only 2 good games in that pack, screw that. How many gigabytes would that shit take up? More than the average computer user even has, I'm sure.

I may just be a bitter guy with a shitty computer though, so beware.

Posted: Feb 20 2010 12:32 pm

No, you're right. You'd play STALKER, Saints Row 2, and maybe the Red Faction games. I haven't heard of any of the other games, so they're probably crap.

Posted: Feb 20 2010 12:34 pm

Syd Lexia wrote:

No, you're right. You'd play STALKER, Saints Row 2, and maybe the Red Faction games. I haven't heard of any of the other games, so they're probably crap.

The Dawn of War games are really fantastic futuristic RTS games set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

I think they are some of the genre's best offerings.

Posted: Feb 20 2010 01:24 pm

Company of Heroes also are among the best RTS games of the last 10 years, especially if you're into WWII games. Titan Quest was also a pretty decent Diablo clone that I enjoyed. That really is a hell of a lot of gaming for the price.

You guys can be bitter all you want, but I'm telling you pure DLC is the future of gaming.

Posted: Feb 20 2010 02:44 pm

Syd Lexia wrote:

No, you're right. You'd play STALKER, Saints Row 2, and maybe the Red Faction games. I haven't heard of any of the other games, so they're probably crap.

You just haven't heard of Company Of Heroes and Dawn Of War, becasue THQ was smart enough not to try dumb them down and port them to the console crawd. Bell

Posted: Feb 20 2010 02:51 pm

lol sick burn

Posted: Feb 20 2010 04:16 pm

It would be a sick burn if "crawd" was actually a word.

Or, if I cared. If a game can't be faithfully ported to a console, then it's probably an RTS or FPS. Zzzzzzz...... boring.

Joined: Dec 15 2008 Posts: 199

Company of Heroes is a beautiful and much more personal rts than most.

Also Titan Quest from what I hear is fun for the most part but lacks polish. Considering how many Wii games you own Syd I'm sure that not all of them are complete gems, though most are worth playing. Same goes for a lot of that THQ pack.

Posted: Feb 20 2010 04:46 pm

Fair enough.

Banned Joined: Sep 13 2008 Posts: 3129

I personally think that rather than making it hard for the gamers to play games they should focus more on methods of making sure that their systems won't play pirated games.

simple things like making discs that go for the PS3 smaller so pirates cant burn the pirated games to a CD

and this goes along with what was said earlier about gamestop

You know, Gamestop can be a pain in the ass sometimes but the one in my town is fairly good.

I sold my first generation PSP for enough money to buy the Devil May Cry trilogy. And the pricing on used games is actually fairly cheap. I got Mirror's edge for $20 last year when it was still fairly new.

Actually they won an award from the corporate headquarters for having their store run so smoothly without hardly any complaints.

The only thing they did that pissed me off was not telling the prices of a certain game and how much a used game will cost over the phone. But now that i live within walking distance I don't really care.

...I wonder if they still don't do that seeing as how the other game store in my town closed down

Joined: Oct 01 2009 Posts: 5316

Panda, while I agree with you that you SHOULD do your homework when it comes to buying a game, it's still not the only case for me, because I constantly see games I'm intrigued to play without reading up on anything about them, that was part of the fun of buying games during the 90's.

2010 SLF Tag Champ Joined: Jun 07 2006 Posts: 12294

Andrew Man wrote:

The Dawn of War games are really fantastic futuristic RTS games set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

I think they are some of the genre's best offerings.

I agree with this statement.

2010 SLF Tag Champ Joined: Jun 07 2006 Posts: 12294

Hacker wrote:

The only thing they did that pissed me off was not telling the prices of a certain game and how much a used game will cost over the phone.

They aren't supposed to do that because a lot of times people will be in a wal mart or something, calling from their cellphone, trying to see what games to steal for maximum profit. This is also one reason on why you get less back in cash as compared to store credit, and why you need to be over 18 and have photo id to get cash.

Posted: Feb 21 2010 01:05 pm

Hacker wrote:

I personally think that rather than making it hard for the gamers to play games they should focus more on methods of making sure that their systems won't play pirated games.

simple things like making discs that go for the PS3 smaller so pirates cant burn the pirated games to a CD.

Those only work for short term solutions. Gamecube had smaller disc. You know what hackers (sic) discovered? They could dremel down DVD-R to copy the games. And, then DVD-Mini-Rs came out and, BAM!, instant media. Dreamcast had a completely original media. GDs. They held more data than CDs. (Approx 1Gb a disc). Did that stop pirates? Nope. They re-encoded larger games by downsampling music or FMV videos, to make them fit on CDs.

Even cartridge based systems aren't safe. See R4/M3 for NDS, and even earlier the Z64 for the N64.

Posted: Feb 21 2010 01:54 pm

Knyte wrote:

Hacker wrote:

I personally think that rather than making it hard for the gamers to play games they should focus more on methods of making sure that their systems won't play pirated games.

simple things like making discs that go for the PS3 smaller so pirates cant burn the pirated games to a CD.

Those only work for short term solutions. Gamecube had smaller disc. You know what hackers (sic) discovered? They could dremel down DVD-R to copy the games. And, then DVD-Mini-Rs came out and, BAM!, instant media. Dreamcast had a completely original media. GDs. They held more data than CDs. (Approx 1Gb a disc). Did that stop pirates? Nope. They re-encoded larger games by downsampling music or FMV videos, to make them fit on CDs.

Even cartridge based systems aren't safe. See R4/M3 for NDS, and even earlier the Z64 for the N64.

Nothing is safe, where there's a will there's a way.

Posted: Feb 21 2010 02:06 pm

Blackout wrote:

Knyte wrote:

Hacker wrote:

I personally think that rather than making it hard for the gamers to play games they should focus more on methods of making sure that their systems won't play pirated games.

simple things like making discs that go for the PS3 smaller so pirates cant burn the pirated games to a CD.

Those only work for short term solutions. Gamecube had smaller disc. You know what hackers (sic) discovered? They could dremel down DVD-R to copy the games. And, then DVD-Mini-Rs came out and, BAM!, instant media. Dreamcast had a completely original media. GDs. They held more data than CDs. (Approx 1Gb a disc). Did that stop pirates? Nope. They re-encoded larger games by downsampling music or FMV videos, to make them fit on CDs.

Even cartridge based systems aren't safe. See R4/M3 for NDS, and even earlier the Z64 for the N64.

Nothing is safe, where there's a will there's a way.

And this is true with any piece of technology in general.

Posted: Feb 21 2010 09:42 pm

FNJ wrote:

Hacker wrote:

The only thing they did that pissed me off was not telling the prices of a certain game and how much a used game will cost over the phone.

They aren't supposed to do that because a lot of times people will be in a wal mart or something, calling from their cellphone, trying to see what games to steal for maximum profit. This is also one reason on why you get less back in cash as compared to store credit, and why you need to be over 18 and have photo id to get cash.

I'm not trying to start anything but I don't see how "people...in a wal mart" is a reason or any reason. The reason is simple. GameStop doesn't want to quote a price and then have an r-tard come in and start talking about "One of your employees told me the game was $9.99 but the price tag says $29.99. I demand to pay $9.99!" By not soliciting prices over the phone they avoid that confrontation from ever occuring. Prices can also fluctuate which also makes it less appealing to do.

Also, GameStop offers a lower cash value on trades because the customer trading in the game is not typically going to be spending that money in the store, so in essence the company makes more buy giving more (credit). I'm not saying people don't steal games and sell them for money but thats not a reason why they give less in cash.