What would be the potential impacts of a second hand digital games market?

At some point in the future as more people with digital 'wealth' get older and die the need for the ability to transfer or re-sell digital products will grow.

What happens when any digital games once sold can be easily re-sold or transferred to another?

Would this reduce profits for games developers further, as 'long tail' sales drop into this second hand market?

Or will we all be running our games as subscription/patreon services by then?

 

Or each transfer of a game to another person has a small transfer fee so that the publishers make extra money on each transfer and won't be against it.

 

Very likely, 99.9% of digital 'wealth' would be worth next to nothing 5-10 years after it was made, due to frantic competition, changing customer preferences and becoming technologically obsolete. I don't think this is going to be a problem. You might as well worry about how to re-sell an analysis of the stock market 20 years from now.

There's a desperately small number of digital products that are likely to be able to evolve and survive that period of time, and besides being large products that are managed by multi-billion dollar companies (thus pretty much irrelevant to us), they almost certainly won't include a significant number of games.

 

Interesting point but what is the active lifespan of a new game, hours, days, weeks, a month, several, a year or two?

http://steamspy.com/year/2017 -> Average playtime: 5 hrs 24 minutes.

In theory on average 6 hours after purchase a game could be on the second hand market.

 

I agree. I have tried to show people old games that I still have disks for, so I could explain why those old games were able to create such a lasting impression on the industry. Most people these days cringe at the sight of the old games. Nobody would pay to be able to transfer Doom (1993) or Descent (1994). If somebody really wanted to play something old, there is usually already an inexpensive way to simply purchase the old game through Steam or something similar.

Additionally, a lot of really old games are available in other ways. For example, I played Sinistar yesterday with one of my cousins. He had the ROM and an emulator for it on his phone. None of the young kids wanted to play it. Several kids had tablets that could have run the game, but none of those kids even wanted it. They all wanted to play modern games.

 

Well sure, that's not a question of years any more. I think games half a fairly short half-life as a product.

 

That is an oversimplification. Some recent games like PUBG and ARK have been played a lot, while some games have barely been played. Grabbing an average to use as a "second hand market" point does not really make sense. Some games like "What Remains of Edith Finch" have a set playtime. For example, you can play through all of "What Remains of Edith Finch" in about 2 to 2.5 hours. So "What Remains of Edith Finch" would be ready for a "second hand market" well before your 6 hour point. By contrast, PUBG can easily be played for hundreds or even thousands of hours. A player would likely keep PUBG until they could no longer tolerate the network lag issues and other bugs in the game.

Someday when I die, my entire Steam library will be worthless. Even if I could transfer it, nobody would want it. The entire idea of transferring digital licenses of old games is a bit silly.

 

How long can copyright law really last in the digital age? I think within about 50 years, everything creative that is made will be owned by all humanity. It will be as if the human race is a hive mind. We will just create things for the joy of creation itself. Freely using anybody else's digital work at will.

Enjoy this 100 year gold rush of digital copyright of software while it lasts. Bill Gates invented it and became the richest man on the planet. But soon they will see the emperor has no clothes.

 

Most games will end up being licensed not owned for digital transactions. This way, it's licensed to a person and not transferable.

Typical indie games, yes. But AAA is migrating to GAAS, which is full of ... well, microtransactions of course!

To spell it out: AAA already knows that games have a short window in which to be profitable and consumer trends are moving toward purchasing fewer unique titles and spending more on the same title. This was covered in the final issue of Develop mag, and you can probably find that online with a ton of supporting evidence.

TLDR: want the income stream and user habits of a subscription MMO without the hassle or genre.

 

Interesting - though probably not surprising given the way that AAA games seem to be heading collectively for a Facebook business model of positioning their game in the center of their players lives, and keeping it there as long as possible with microtransactions and dlc.

But still, I don't think this is all that relevant to most indies. It's very hard and expensive to pull off that sort of game to begin with, let alone build up the infrastructure and momentum to make it still relevant within even a few years. For most of us I think the games we are making will occupy a very short time in a player's life, which is fine with me since I think that's sort of where games belong - though it would be nice to make the sort of game that leaves a lasting impression, which is the greatest honor I think any art can achieve.

 

Yeah but you know, invasive tech from a young age doing that as standard means that the profit margins for indies get progressively smaller by the day. So this is fine if you're not making money. It's fine for it to be art, but it's difficult to rely on for a living.

 

I thought that's how it already was? There are exceptions, but isn't the default position that aside from gift purchases games aren't transferable between accounts, and we're not supposed to allow anyone else access to our accounts?

And this isn't limited to games. I read an article a while ago about a couple who had inherited a relative's book collection and was trying to figure out what to do with it. They didn't want to throw it away, but they had nowhere to keep it long term, and nobody else wanted the books because they were of no value. Personally, my thoughts are that the value in that collection is mostly in the collector's enjoyment of putting it together rather than in the physical books themselves.

In that case, the couple inherited a burden because they suddenly had all of this valueless stuff to store which they were sentimentally disinclined to throw away. Digitising things has its downsides, but that at least is one problem it solves - even if you do keep it, digital storage is cheap.

I think that game collections are likely to be similar in terms of future value to anyone other than collectors. Even looking at my collection of physical games here, the vast majority aren't going to be played again and have no value other than as reminders of fond memories which are specific to me.

Add compatibility issues to that as well. If I want to play my old copy of Anachronox will it even work on any of my current PCs? Or would I need to visit gog.com in hopes they've got a version with compatibility updates anyway?

 

We need to abolish our dependence on money, first.

• Some people depend on creative work for their income. If we take away its financial value they'll have to stop creating and start doing other stuff.
• A lot of creative stuff also costs a lot of money to make. Do you imagine GTA 6 being made by hundreds of people going unpaid for 5 years using only free or donated tools because the project has no budget?

And even if it was financially viable for people to step all over other peoples' creative works, is it creatively viable? If you create something successful are you open to the idea of immediately losing control of the IP because other people freely jump in and start making their own versions / continuations / spin-offs? This is something definitely worth experimenting with since it does work in software. That said, my gut feel is that with the Internet being what it is, if open and free creative projects had a chance of taking off in a mainstream way we'd have seen some by now.

 

That's true. The solution, in my opinion, is to develop a competitive game store business model based on high barrier to entry, manual review of products, and a guaranteed (relatively) high visibility and promotion for anything that gets through. I think at the highest level of the market that indies can reach, it should be excruciatingly difficult to get accepted.

It's not possible to be competitive where you are up against an option that has high mass appeal and high consistency of quality (AAA games) and your corner of the market is overloaded with rubbish amongst which might be found a gold nugget here and there.

It's like trying to make people choose to come and bin-dive for food for $1 when they can cross the road and spend $5 at Macdonalds. The only customers you'll get are fanatics and crusaders who will gladly sort through the crappy food if it serves their ideology.

On the other hand if you open some kind of carefully curated 'indie' restaurant across from macdonalds, jacked up the price and made sure everything was unique, stylish and well-done, you could get a decent piece of the pie. Unfortunately, for games this sort of thing does not exist to any substantial degree. Until it does, indies will always be fighting the market, fighting eachother, and fighting the powers-that-be that are making people evilly head toward macdonalds instead of trying something different.

 

Steam had a good run. Greenlight is dead.

 

That was something, but nowhere near enough IMO. Regardless of where most indies go to peddle their wares, if a place does not exist in the market where let's say only 1% or less of indie games are good enough to get through, I think something is missing and indies will suffer for it.

What a lot of people I think fail to realise is that the very strength of indies is in their ability to do some aspect(s) of development better than AAA, or at least different in a way that it does not make sense for AAA to even try to follow. Niches, essentially. And if you have only a few, very high quality niche products, you have a very good business position, one that's very defensible against mass appeal competition.

If you think about Amazon, and the reason why they are opening a range of physical bookstores even as many very well established physical booksellers are going out of business, I think this is analogous to the situation of the game market and what indies should be doing. Amazon's physical stores are very small places with a very small range of books that have been carefully chosen, and the whole thing is created around an experience that's aesthetically very difficult to do with masses of products.

If indie developers creating great games on small budgets want to make an escape from being small fish in a huge ocean, populated by anything from plastic bags to great white sharks, they have to head for the 'narrow way' as they say, that takes a lot of hard work to get through, but which offers an opportunity to make much, much more of their particular strengths than they otherwise would.

Otherwise (and I wouldn't be surprised if this happens) AAA studios will capture this niche ideal, this ideology, this opportunity for themselves, the same way that Amazon captured both ends of a market where their competition was fighting the market itself instead of adapting.

 

But that's exactly what Greenlight was...

And indies are not competing with AAA and I don't think they ever did or will. It's not even the same market.

 

Are you saying less 1% of games that tried to get greenlit actually succeeded?

In any case, the greenlight process had a lot of faults. For one thing there's pretty much no standard except what the 'internet' is feeling like doing that day, and there was all sorts of abuse and trolling (not just negative but voting in random crap for jokes) going on from what I heard. Not exactly a great way to run a business.

What needs to happen is a place with maybe a couple of hundred games max, handpicked by the store as the very best that the indie scene has to offer, a gold standard for indies to aim toward. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the approach and the setting has to be right to communicate the right message.

Of course they were 'competing' on Steam, in the sense of rubbing shoulders on the same store and competing for customer attention. Whether or not they were utterly outmatched is a different story.

 

I know not many games got through.

Games are entertainment industry. "what the 'internet' is feeling like doing that day" is the whole business model.

Do you have an idea for a service that provides something better than literally voting for memes? Because that sounds like economic opportunity. And the fact that you aren't making millions right now leads me to believe you probably don't have it.

Yes I'm sure stores know exactly what a good game is. There is absolutely no way a store would ever prioritize sales over item quality.

Incidentally this brings us to your point

I said they're not the "same market", not "same store".
You don't find condoms very far from comic books.

 

I clicked reply to argue against this, but reread it before I started, and nope. nevermind, I read it wrong the first time. I definitely agree, but I'm here, so I'll do this anyways.

The indie devs as a whole will not suffer. The "cut-and-paste for a week to cash in quick indies" would.
There would be more blood, sweat and tears put into indie games to make the cut, and the general quality of the indie world would definitely benefit, and indie devs would stop getting a bad rap for all being the cut-and-paste variation.
Devs and players both hit a win-win. Games that actually have effort put into them, will get seen, and players wouldn't have to pay AAA prices for good games.
There is my un-disagree.
Is there a strict grading marketplace in the works?

 

Never will compete but its getting harder to survive than before. Much more competition among indies, much more noise, no greenlight, more marketing requirement (that we can't afford).

 

This is true. I was just saying that indies can't and won't compete with AAA.
Let's just say that, from purely market standpoint, if indies could potentially compete with AAA, there would be a lot of AAA employees shifting to indie side.

 

I think there's quite a few AAA employees trying it on over the years. Get a few guys together like that and you have a game like Darkest Dungeon (which I got around to enjoying over the holiday period).

Darkest Dungeon is a good example. It knows precisely how to make an impact without blowing the budget. You'd look at it and think "I could do that" and you could, but they chose that for a larger experienced team. So imagine what it should look like for one person to be practical?

 

Not at all. It's very likely that those who participate in greenlight are often there for the thrills of representing the 'internet mob' rather than representing a coherent push for better games.

I'm not interested in running a shop at the moment, I want to make games. And there's another thing, in the current climate of vocal victim mentality and mob riot over the internet, I imagine public relations would be difficult to maintain with all of the devs of the 99% of the stuff you are refusing into your shop. But that's the price you pay in this day and age for having a coherent set of standards, I suppose.

If they could withhold themselves from making the fatal mistake of trying to compete with steam on its terms, then they could certainly prioritize quality and win a share of the market. In fact this is the very thing that would give them a separate identity. I think also that it's necessary for a store like Steam to exist in the first place, to provide a backdrop.

It all depends on framing and presentation. It would have to be marketed very hard on the premise that the world needs a store that is not interested in putting anything and everything on the shelf. I mean, for example if Hideo Kojima opened such a store, I think it would succeed very well - one way or the other it needs to be built on a very strong identity of quality over quantity. The entire presentation and experience of it would have to reflect the same sort of attitude that Apple had to its product market. But if it's just called GrabAGame.com and just looks like an empty clone of Steam, of course, it would sink like a stone.

 

I believe its called the public consciousness.

 

Said every dev, who failed to get greenlit, ever.
That 'internet mob' is who uses steam. That 'internet mob' is who buys games. Clerk doesn't decide what customers want.

It would have been a lot easier to just say "I've got nothing". I never said anything about running a store. You could have sold your idea to someone who is interested in making such store. There is more than one way to get your idea out there.
And don't give me that "not interested at the moment", "my 1% standards would be too hard on devs" or "PR would be hard".
If you genuinely believed your idea would work, you'd be on that like hair on my arse. Unless this whole section of your post was dedicated to you explaining why your idea wouldn't work, in which case, why are you complaining over something that already exists and works?

So, who's doing it?
Steam has been around for 14 years now. Are you saying in the whole of 14 years (or however long steam has been providing service to indie games) nobody thought about or tried your idea?

 

Steam wouldn't have discontinued it on mere rumors. If there wasn't any truth behind the problems that plagued it then they would have allowed it to continue.

 

I don't know too much about greenlight, I never bothered to spend much time on there. I'm going by stuff I heard. But generally I did find a lot of games that I consider to be poor quality (not genre-specific or anything, but technically deficient and poorly designed), that got greenlit, so it already fails as a way to set a very high, consistent standard for a store - which is the premise which would literally make this idea succeed or fail, because if it does not differentiate clearly, it won't work.

Do you have any idea of the investment of time, money and energy required to run an online store? I don't want that right now, maybe not ever.

Greenlight doesn't work as a way to differentiate a new store clearly from steam, or to create an identity that's fundamentally about very high quality and not simply democracy. Democracy is about inclusion (and as I said, the existence of a place like Steam that's either democratic, or at minimum easy to get into, is a prerequisite for this idea to work, so that this store is not excluding anybody from the market as a whole, but only from this particular store).

Maybe only recently the circumstances are ready for this kind of idea. Because the mobile stores are already submerged, and people are scrambling toward Steam. Steam and its indie PC market used to be considered, just because of the type of people that happened to go there and not to the mobile stores, as more of a 'serious', 'authentic' sort of place. But that's changing fast. So now nobody is really considered to have that identity, and it's more up for grabs.

 

Greenlight didn't represent either of those groups of people faithfully, though. It represented "people who choose to vote on Greenlight", which was a subset of those groups.

 

Not to mention that mobs (as opposed to the larger set of those they ostensibly represent) have a sort of morbid fascination with destroying the integrity of the very thing that gave them a platform in the first place. That's what I heard happened to Greenlight - games getting voted in so that they could fail spectacularly, perhaps to destroy the efficacy of the system itself.

Not the sort of thing you can create an identity around that is based on standards.

 

Darkest Dungeon is a pretty successful example of this. That game is awesome in every aspect, from game design to voiceovers and soundtrack. There are tons of less successful examples though.

 

From ex-AAA though? If so please list as they're interesting case studies.