A Look Back

With the announcement of yet another game I was interested in being tainted by a shady business tactic (specifically the upcoming title Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning using an online pass), I was disgusted. What happened in this industry?

Change. It comes to everything in time.

No, not just couch cushions. Get your head out of there and pay attention.

Some change is good, some is bad. In the couch's case sometimes it's a decades old Cheeto. But whichever it is, it's important to not only rally behind or rail against it, but to try to understand where it comes from. To that end, I want to look back at some recent changes in the gaming industry. I've spoken against the myriad bad business practices in the past, but now let's have a look at what may have caused them.

So, what is the immediate reason for the Online Pass policy, among other undesirables, increasingly infecting our games? To attempt to combat the used games market. However, the used games market is as old as the game companies themselves. What's changed that it's now a "threat" to them? More and more people have come to gaming in recent years. The market has exploded. Gaming has hit true mainstream status.

Hipster Link: "The games I was in used to be made for fun. You've probably never heard of it."

Look back at how games used to be made and targeted toward specific audiences. RPGs didn't worry about being too complex to be accessible for everyone. Shooters were made without Skinner Box level up systems, and were there just to pit you against other players on a level playing field. And so on with each type of game only trying to be itself.

Then came the increase in gamers who are new to the experience. A tidal wave of new people looking to spend money, and not sure what to get. They immediately started going for the easier, more accessible titles. Completely understandable. You can't expect someone whose only gaming experience is Bejeweled to grasp the intricacies of StarCraft strategy, or follow through the twisting warren that an MGS title has for a story. And since these new gamers are almost entirely casual players, they either can't or don't care to spend the time and effort required to excel in or understand them.

Since accessibility became the biggest demand by virtue of sheer numbers, that's where the industry went. Suddenly, almost every game that came out needed to be as accessible to everyone as possible, not just those interested in its genre, to try to capture the largest possible sales. And for a while sales were crazy good. Everyone kept buying whatever they were told through media or word of mouth was a good game.

The problem starts here. No matter how accessible it is, people just aren't going to like some game types. But with no experience to tell them which they will or won't like, they just tried everything they heard was good only to be disappointed. And so the games they didn't like got traded in. After a little while, the newbies started to learn what they liked and didn't, so sales started to even out. Those who had learned they liked FPS mostly just bought FPS, and no matter how well advertised a fighter was they would no longer buy it because it was well spoken of if they'd learned they didn't like them. (This process is still ongoing, of course. New gamers arrive every day, though not in the numbers of the original wave of casuals.)

This seems to have caused a shift in the view of game makers (mostly publishers). They had become used to this level of sales and the sudden "drop" made them start worrying. Instead of counting every sale they got and appreciating it, they began trying to count every sale they didn't get and worrying over it. If a game's predecessor had sold 10 million units, but the new one sold only 7 million it wasn't just that the sequel didn't sell as well. It was 3 million in "lost" sales.

Pictured: Delusion

Meanwhile, as a byproduct of the learning process the casuals (Well, vets too, I suppose. The process never truly ends. Their numbers just aren't as great.) are going through, used game outlets are practically covered up in used titles. They begin selling those more cheaply than the new ones, as they should for a used good (Gamestop, etc, overcharging is a different discussion), so people buy them.

The makers look at the numbers with their altered view, and decide that every used sale is a lost new sale. But this is a flawed view. Just because someone buys a used copy does not mean that they would have bought the same game new at a higher price if the used option were removed. Used games are selling because new games are expensive, and used ones less so. In today's economy you can expect nothing less. But that's not what the makers see, and so now the used games industry is a "grave threat" to their business instead of the boon it used to be.

To put it simply, the industry has bitten off more than it can chew, but insist they need to bite off more instead of giving the market time to digest this change. They need to accept the fact that the sales aren't going to be like that again for a long time at the least. They need to stop trying to rush titles out the door to keep people on the line. They need to go back to doing what they used to do best and just make games that people enjoy. Each company needs to stop trying to control the entire market with pointless, morally gray business practices and rushed titles trying to appeal to everyone, and just let everything take its natural course. It will all normalize.

Until we go for full digital distribution anyway.