{"id":2634,"date":"2009-03-20T17:06:06","date_gmt":"2009-03-20T21:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2634"},"modified":"2010-05-12T08:39:16","modified_gmt":"2010-05-12T13:39:16","slug":"experienced-points-the-price-of-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2634","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: The Price of Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not content with telling developers how to do their jobs,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/editorials\/experienced-points\/5871-The-Price-of-Fun\"> I&#8217;m now second-guessing the publishers<\/a>. Go read the whole thing to see what I&#8217;m talking about.<\/p>\n<p>After I wrote the article I realized a couple of points that were likely to attract objections:<\/p>\n<p>1) Digital downloads have actually been following the model I suggest in the article for a while now.  Games of yesteryear &#8211; even just one or two years old &#8211; can be found dirt cheap.  It&#8217;s retail prices that resist falling, and I think most of the dysfunction is found there.  That&#8217;s also where most of the sales are.<\/p>\n<p>2) I know the retail market is more complex than I make it out to be, particularly with places like EB Games where it&#8217;s in their best interests to keep prices on new games as high as possible. EB Games might simply keep the price high, even if (say) Activision lowered the MSRP.  (It is a <em>suggested<\/em> retail price, after all.) However, I think outfits like Wal-Mart and Target &#8211; places where they <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> trade games &#8211; would likely lower the prices.  This might possibly result in a rewarding scenario where gamers buy new at Target and unload used at EB Games, which could have all sorts of hilariously bad effects on EB Games.   <\/p>\n<p>3) I know this is mostly guesswork outside of my assigned area of game design.  If I really botched my analysis, I&#8217;m sure people will&#8230; let me know.  At any rate, I&#8217;d at least like to see them <em>experiment<\/em> with prices a bit, instead of trying to come up with tricks to impede second-hand sales.  Gamers are not the villains in the second-hand games market, but predictably they are the first target of the publishers.<\/p>\n<p>4) That last line was a good one. I should have put it in the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not content with telling developers how to do their jobs, I&#8217;m now second-guessing the publishers. Go read the whole thing to see what I&#8217;m talking about. After I wrote the article I realized a couple of points that were likely to attract objections: 1) Digital downloads have actually been following the model I suggest in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[155],"class_list":["post-2634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","tag-experienced-points"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}