I hate to think what it cost to make, refine, balance and tune - but I can guarantee it added a whole lot of zeroes to the budget, and made the P&L look a lot more challenging. What on Earth was the point of taking the completely single player experience of Uncharted 1 and bolting on an entirely new game to Nathan Drake's second adventure? The multiplayer game (brilliantly executed as one would expect of the Naughty Dog team) had absolutely nothing to do with the single player experience, and from my perspective had absolutely zero interest from me as a consumer, and I'm not alone in that.
ONE TRUE GAME STUDIOS SERIES
Let's take a great example, one of my favorite game series released on this generation - Uncharted. The problem is, at what cost? Countless millions of dollars would be the answer. It works wonderfully for Call of Duty - no doubt it can work wonderfully for me. How do I stop churn? I implement multiplayer and attempt to keep my disc with my consumer playing online against their friends. The real cost of used games is the death of single player gaming.
"The real cost of used games has been the destruction of the mid-tier publisher and the elimination of many an independent development studio" Richard Browne But there's a much bigger, much more expensive way of trying to stop churn and it's the one that everyone has flooded to. But more to the point - do I really want talented studios spending their time designing and implementing this rather than polishing the game? No, I really don't.
ONE TRUE GAME STUDIOS CODE
Do I really want to have to type in a token code when I buy a game? No, you've just added annoyance and friction to my experience. Whether this be online passes, copious amounts of DLC, or gating mechanisms, one thing is for sure - it doesn't benefit the consumer.
Developers and publishers alike now spend many hours working on constructs, systems and game design elements to try and eliminate the churn of a game. The real cost of used games is the damage that is being wrought on the creativity and variety of games available to the consumer, and it's directly a result of these practices. That's the state of retail today, and it's not healthy for the consumer at all. After pressuring the sales assistant for a few minutes he finally got his new game - but only after the assistant got his manager's approval to sell it to him. He went into his local GameStop and was point blank REFUSED the option of buying the game he went to get new. A colleague of mine brought to light how bad this has become just the other week. Today that actually still holds true publishers don't hate used games, but they do hate the practices of GameStop and those that followed to force used games upon their customers - if you want to hear about nuclear options, GameStop fired theirs first. Used games were never, have never, been an issue to any of them. I've been in this industry for 25 years, I've run development (internal and external) for seven different publishers. In truth it is nothing of the sort and what each and every article fails to account for is the REAL cost of used games. Without fail, each and every one of these articles seems to take a damning view of this concept even industry "analysts" like Michael Pachter have weighed in on what cost this would have to first party and third parties alike and how it would damage the industry, going as far as labeling the concept "evil". Over the past few weeks there have been a number of articles appearing on websites across the globe fearing the concept that Sony and Microsoft are going to use, as GamesIndustry International itself put it, "the Nuclear Option" by blocking the ability to play used games on their next generation of hardware.