How the Gaming Industry can "Stop" Gamestop

The Gamestop Battles have been heating up…..again. Before it was the major controversy involving Capcom and EA trying to find ways to prevent resale. Then we had the XBox One and their DRM disaster. And now in the latest news, a PS4 developer is criticizing the practices of Gamestop and its concept of making extra money off of pre-purchased games. He says that the used game sales from Gamestop affects the game development companies and hurts the gaming industry overall.

Now, while I will save this argument for another day (You know, the argument about how the gaming industry seems to be the ONLY one mildly upset at the resales of their product as opposed to movies, cars, houses, electronics, etc. etc. etc.) , there is a fun simple way to combat the supposed business-killing ways of the Gamestop:





Stop. Being. So. ****ing. Expensive.


Pricing is everything, especially in a tougher economy. Nintendo’s battle against Blockbuster was short-lived in the early 90s because a) Nintendo was making fantastic money nonetheless, especially between 1994-1996 leading up to the Virtual Boy disaster and the rise of the Playstation and b) it was the 90s and everybody had money back then. The Clinton Days were good days full of good money flowing left and right.

Nowadays however, we don’t have that type of luxury. The 2000s brought upon some tough times. We are still attempting to recover. And with that the better deal always won, regardless of quality. The last time we had a good system that was the best in the business and the most economically affordable was the Playstation 2 about a decade ago. The best bang for your buck has been the victor in the past couple generations: the Playstation 2, the Nintendo Wii, and now the Nintendo 3DS which is literally eating away at the handheld market.

You are releasing $60 games with $5-$10 DLC packs left and right. And we are not including the increasing prices of online play, controllers, accessories, and other amenities. Games back then ranged from $35-$50 and we were done. Nintendo used to do their Player’s Choice on the SNES-N64 days to great success. PS2 had their share of Greatest Hits. Nowadays they still do it, but with smaller fanfare (Nintendo used to give their games ribbons) and less of a willingness to cut prices to so many games. Madden 2012 is about a year old, and still has the same price. And football season finished back in February. Why?

I am repeating this: if you want to defeat Gamestop and win the Eighth Generation you need to become the most economically friendly of the Big 3. And for the future, you need to be friendlier towards the backwards-compatibility feature. You think Xbox 360 and PS3’s heavy restrictions on what previous-gen games were allowed to be played helped them at all? Hell no. Nintendo took the better route and allowed ALL Gamecube games to be backwards-compatible, and even the controllers themselves could be re-used.

Is it a coincidence that one of the most-played games from the Sixth Generation (XB, PS2, GC, Dreamcast R.I.P.) happens to be Super Smash Brothers Melee? And now it turns out that both the Xbox One and the PS4 will also not be backwards-compatible. I am just saying, we have sent spacecraft to Pluto----it is not impossible to give improving technology the ability to play older games. If there is ANY advantage the WiiU has, it’s being the only Big 3 system to allow the play of Seventh Generation games without having to pay extra.

You wondering why Gamestop is making all this extra money for used games, yet however make it impossible for newer systems to play older games that gamers had already purchased. You think we are going to use the disks to hold paper when they become unplayable in the newer systems? You think lower middle class families would rather fork over $400 on a new system with $60 games as opposed to hitting a Gamestop and purchasing a $75 used older system with $10-$30 video games available? Be serious.

Make your older games available through the DLC. Don’t be afraid to drop prices on older games. Can you believe that Smash Brothers Brawl is still $50? This game is the best-selling fighting game in HISTORY!! Drop the price a little you pricks, you are essentially begging for us to search elsewhere to find cheaper product.

I am not a Gamestop fan by any means, but they will forever be the sexier alternative for poorer gamers and families and people just looking for a quick good game without having to sacrifice too much of the wallet. Gamestop and the other smaller game stores with similar concepts will continue to bust profits as long as it becomes tougher to have access to these older games in modern times. Gamestop secretly loves that the bigger higher-profile games are $60 at least, it makes their job that much easier.

Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, you need more cheaper games. You need to drop the prices on your systems and accessories and extra details if you want the places like Gamestop to supposedly crack into your profits. We need more $40, $30, $20 games. We need more games from the past through DLC and the infamous Virtual Console. We just need more options and opportunities to dish out smaller amounts of money. The video game industry needs to be more like the car industry: an extremely wide variety of options and prices to go with it. If every car was priced the same as a new Mercedes, I assure you more people would carpool or find other ways to get around.



Gamestop isn’t the problem. The ever-increasing expenses of the industry is.

How Nintendo Can Win the Indie Crowd

So the PS3 and the XBox 360 had their share of indie hits as well as their large-budget hits. There's Castle Crashers, Journey, Explosion Man, Shadow Complex, and then we have those that have become mainstream like your Candy Crush and Angry Birds. These small hits are a mix of cheaper prices, bite-sized entertainment, and every once in a while branch out and experiment with the limits of what you can do with video games.

Nintendo, like in most categories seemingly nowadays, is a little bit behind this trend. They haven't really gotten many (if any) indie games they can claim for themselves. This only adds to the notion that third-party and Nintendo may never get along ever again.

But there is still one thing Nintendo has that the competitors don't have that can give the Japanese giant its first true advantage and step up on the others: dozens of franchises sitting on the shelf.



For example, since the early 2000s we have not seen the likes of: Wario Land, Puzzle League, StarTropics, Ice Climber, Earthbound, Nintendo Wars (Advance Wars), 2-D Metroid, Mario Tennis and Mario Golf (The RPG versions), Mole Mania, Brain Age, Super Mario Land (trust me, these games play faaaar different from the other 2-D Mario games) and many more. I point these out specifically because these franchises don't really require the larger budgets and larger teams like Zelda, 3-D Metroid, and Mario (Although one can argue indie companies can have the resources to make Mario games).

So, what if Nintendo decides to lend some of these on-the-shelf franchises to indie companies and see what they can pull off? Even better, what if Nintendo took some of the heavier-hitting franchises like Mario, Kirby, perhaps even Pokemon and see what results may occur? The reason why the Disney/Pixar connection works is because Disney merely provides the money and resources, while letting Pixar do its own magic. The result is (up until recently) amazing animated movies that sometimes veers towards an indie flavor because of a lack of a corporate interruption. You really think Dreamworks would have given films like Wall-E, Up, and Ratatouille a chance?

Nintendo may not have the money of Sony or Microsoft, but they have dozens of usable ideas that can be given to new hands and they can be molded into something special. There are dozens of small companies waiting for its chance to shine. Nintendo can benefit from this by reviving one of their fallen and/or forgotten franchises while at the same time provide the confidence and care towards small-small game companies that others would love to see.

Perhaps the road to a better third-party relationship starts with the really little guys. I would love to see a world in which it contains an Indie Nintendo division full of small companies making smaller games for the WiiU and 3DS.

Nintendo, you have a chance to improve your online gaming community. With your abundance of franchises and a willingness to cater to the indie gaming crowd/industry, an improvement can start.

But Nintendo, it all starts with you.

$60 For Incompleteness

So Mass Effect 3 has run into a little bit of controversy for two reasons. The main one is because of its ending, which for the sake of spoilers I won’t merely discuss. But, there has been letters written to them and major Twitter campaigns to fix up the ending. The second controversy is smaller in complaints, but to me is a much more damning issue and one that is part of a bigger problem in the world of gaming. Day one downloadable content. When I first read it, I didn’t see what the big deal was until I learned that this DLC was already in the game, but locked from the gamers until you throw in some more dough. This is ridiculous, is happening far too much, and has to stop.

Mass Effect 3 is not the first game to rip off gamers by forcing you to pay for crap that was already in the disc---Capcom is notoriously evil and ridiculous for consistently doing these actions with their fighting games (And they've even done it with their latest game). But this does not justify the actions here. What they did is the 90s equivalent of Nintendo selling you Super Mario World, but then force you to buy a second cartridge at a smaller price to actually finish the game. Sounds silly I know, but if gamers are forking over $60 to play your game, why in the hell are you forcing them to pay extra money to get stuff that is already in the disc they just purchased???!?!!? Why didn’t you at least wait about a month to disguise your disgusting actions?

See, this is why gaming while on the upswing quality-wise is threatening constantly for a total breakdown economically. Smaller games like Angry Birds is exploding in popularity and while it doesn’t have the technical advancements and depth of your best games it has the advantage in one major aspect: price. As opposed to paying over $70 to play a game and enjoy all its extra content, you can now charge in the medium pizza price range and get a full video game that’s actually quite long (adding to its lasting appeal that’s nowadays inevitable). Before this wasn’t possible but thanks to IPod applications, smarter phones, emergence of indie gaming companies, and increasing technology, we can get fun and entertainment at much smaller prices.

The economical pundits will argue that Bioware is out to make money, which is the goal of every company. This is indeed true, but ripping off gamers isn’t the solution: good games are. Say what you will about Nintendo, but they will not half-ass a game or sell one incomplete. Hell, Miyamoto is notorious for constantly delaying games so he can put some extra touches and ensure that everyone will finish the game satisfied. Nintendo has reached the online atmosphere but has yet to throw in this DLC nonsense right after the release of a game. While they are way behind in the online component I can bet you any amount of cash that the company wouldn’t dare pull the nonsense that Bioware, Square Enix (Case in point for Square: Final Fantasy XIII-2), and especially Capcom pulls every so often.

For more fun, let’s compare Super Smash Brothers Brawl to Marvel vs. Capcom 3. One of them has a level creator, several extra video games hidden inside, hundreds of songs to choose from, a much bigger roster when compared to the previous installment, and over 50 different ways of fighting. The other game has a smaller roster, DLC from the start, nothing beyond this content-wise, and then flips the switch by releasing an “Ultimate” version of the game about a year later. Care to guess which is the best-selling fighting game of all time and which one barely sold 2 million copies? And before you care to mention that Nintendo has many more characters (and a deeper history) than Capcom or Marvel—Marvel has thousands of comic book characters---literally—and has been around for decades before Nintendo---literally. The moral of the story here is: we prefer complete games. Most skipped out on MvC3 because we all secretly knew there was going to be another version down the road.

I am all for a company making money, that is fine. But if you are releasing a game to the public, the right and noble thing to do is to allow us access to everything within the game we bought, as opposed to shelling out even more money just to see what else is on the game that we JUST purchased. You may think that gamers aren’t going to rebel to this sort of thing, but with Resident Evil, the Capcom fighters, and other franchises selling less than the previous installments even though the gaming industry fanbase has practically doubled in recent years, you may have to think twice before pulling this crap again. Online gaming has pushed the medium to a new plateau of opportunity, but has also opened new doors to new ways to rip us off.

Shame on you Bioware.