Last week (which seems like a lifetime ago online), video game publisher THQ filled gamers with delicious anger, restricting multiplayer access for some wrestling video game or another to first-run buyers only via a single-use code.*
The angry gamers’ argument seems to be: “We are your customers and you can’t treat us like this!”
THQ’s rather blunt and caustic rebuttal is “If you buy pre-owned games, you aren’t our customers, chucklefuck.”
And seriously, it pains me to say that THQ is right here, but THQ is right. At no point – at no point in the mainstream gaming retail process – do any of us buy anything from the developers of a game. We go to a store and we buy the game at the store, which has ordered it from another link of the supply chain that is, in most cases, still removed from the actual entity that is making the product, the game. Even the NPD sales figures treasured by the exact sort of geek that will be infuriated by this new marketing strategy reflect the buying habits of retailers, not consumers.
Consider that. The gamers are not the customers of the gamemakers.
And as the gamers choose which side they’re going to pile onto, whether it’s rushing to the defense of the developers or championing the savings that the middleman, be it GameStop or the shady used game store down the street, offers their cash-strapped selves. Of course, we’re so used to easy dichotomies that very few people will opt for Team Mike Newton here and say ‘fuck this argument, I’m supporting myself.’
You don’t owe THQ a damn thing. You owe GameStop even less.
It’s incredibly easy to fall into the ‘Scott Pilgrim Trap’ – the notion that spending your money in a certain way, independent of your needs or wants, is your job. That spending is as much your job as earning. That’s a devious fucking idea, and it insinuates into every subculture you can identify. If you like X, you need to buy Y to send a message to Z. Otherwise, they will stop making X forever. That is the trigger they pull.
It’s novel to picture things the way that THQ wants you to: that you are a patron of their arts. You really like wrestling games, so you’re giving them money to create a game that you will enjoy. In reality, though, gaming does not run on a patronage economy. I have spent years reviewing games, and lots of games – probably the majority of games – are unfortunate shit-heaps and, in a lot of cases, you won’t even realize how bad a game is until you’ve bought and paid for it, because any media outlet covering games is governed by the access that some public relations professional has granted it, which leads to a journalism that is really little more than a series of hype gatekeepers (witness magazines like GameStop’s Game Informer, which is essentially a large advertisement for games that GameStop would like you to pre-order and is also full of actual advertisements and which is basically a venus flytrap – or Hotel California, choose your preferred metaphor – of marketing). Witness this summer’s Alpha Protocol, which spent years being lauded as it was developed and then, once it was on shelves, was almost universally panned, for proof of this.
On top of most games not being any good, gaming is an expensive hobby. The standard MSRP for one game on a next-gen console is $59.99. The attach rate for a next-gen console is nearly 9 at this point. Which means that, for every two hundred dollars an average new buyer drops on a PS3, he’s also paying out an additional $539.61. Just on games. And that attach rate is an average – most people who self-identify as a ‘gamer’ probably have multiples of that magic number of 9.
Here is the reality of pre-owned games: they are affordable. Or at least more affordable than the alternative. Most of the time, I buy games new. But the pre-owned market lets me try more games than my wallet could otherwise justify. Like the cel-shaded Prince of Persia relaunch (which was very pretty and hugely disappointing) or Operation: Darkness (which was clunky and ugly and absolutely fascinating both in its premise – an SRPG set in World War II and stocked with vampires, werewolves and the undead – and its play mechanics). Some other games that I’ve found secondhand include Persona 2, Koudelka, Fatal Frame 2, Ring of Red and a ton of others. But the ones I’m calling out, they’re quirky cult-favorite games. Games that were either tough to find first-run or slipped under the radar until it was tough to find them new. Suggesting that I’ve somehow done a disservice to Atlus or Sacnoth because of this is silly. Because I’ve doled out the cash for every Shadow Hearts game that followed Koudelka and have spent an ungodly amount of money over the past ten years on Shin Megami Tensei games. Games like Valkyrie Profile wouldn’t have gotten played by as many people as it has if it weren’t for aftermarket sales. Anecdotally, I can’t believe that aftermarket sales don’t lead to future first-run purchases. Unless you’re talking about games that are predominantly licensed shovelware, in which case you probably don’t want to do that. Unfortunately for THQ, that’s the bulk of their library.
In today’s interview with Avoid the Future, Kevin Church says that the economics of webcomics are “well and truly fucked” and the same thing is very much true of the videogame industry. There are a lot of people working long hours to make games that are, on balance, not that good. To cover the cost of those long hours, that mediocre product is sold at an inflated price point and then the people involved act slighted when buyers don’t trample one another to buy it. And it’s not fair to the devs. I know plenty of the people who create games, who are trapped in the spiderweb, and they are good and talented people. But at the same time, regardless of what various corporations may think, it’s not our job to buy their products, especially not on their terms.
*Regardless of how you feel about the tactic, this implementation of it is absolutely terrible. There are plenty of examples of content codes getting hacked and first-run buyers getting screwed out of the very same bonus content they pre-ordered to get access to. More importantly, now that THQ has angered the lazy, greedy, ‘everything I want should be free’ community of gamers, the unlock code is a bright, happy target.
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