More bandwagon jumping

[dianec42]

Why can't any of the industries to which I give so much of my money ever find a GOOD bandwagon to jump on? I despair.

Just in from Gamesville. Scroll down past the XBox 360 story and you will see this: "Pre-owned games threaten games industry?"

Apparently some nice people in the video games industry have worked out that instead of making billions and billions and billions of dollars, they are only making billions and billions of dollars, and that sales of "pre-owned" (i.e. "used") video games are somehow to blame for this.

I do like the pithy closing remark that "... anyway, the games industry only has itself to blame. When one version of FIFA Soccer is virtually indistinguishable from the next, where's the imperative to buy the new one?"

Comments

Why not sell the same game over and over? The public buys the same movies and music over and over.

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's representative of a major problem for all media, not just games. For decades now, techies have been pushing for electronic content on demand systems, which are more technically feasible now than ever. It's certainly possible for a 'record' store to consist of sample listening stations and a few large machines for printing out CD packages. Problem is, technical feasibility is not economc feasibility. Current sales models put any given media distributor in direct competition with... themselves. Having an entire back catalog available to your market means less attention given to whatever this week's new hotness might be, so they actively suppress knowledge of and access to older material.

To some degree they've acknowledged the inevitability of the trend, but it's only within the last decade that royalty agreements and trademarking law have been extended to cover it, and they won't fully embrace it without some assurance of maintaining their current degree of control over it. (which is yet another thing to rant about, but I shan't digress.)

(Curiously, a quick test of feeding some old band names into Amazon turned up a Foghat T-shirt. hm.)