Many of you loved Crackdown. I loved Crackdown, too. Maybe we should form a club. If we do form a club, Gamestop isn’t allowed to join. Yep, once again a developer did not sell as many games as expected, and those evil, evil secondhand copies are to blame.
“With Crackdown we sold about 1.5 million copies, but even at that we pretty much only managed to break even,” says Realtime Worlds boss Dave Jones. “It was due to the amount of factors that were out of our control as the developer, influences such as GameStop’s amazing used-game sales; we know 1.5 million new copies were sold, but it’s likely there were 2.5, three million sold when you include used.”
To be honest, this kind of thing is expected. It’s not like Microsoft exactly pushed the game out of the gate in terms of marketing, even with the Halo 3 beta key, so it’s little wonder that people bought it used at a much later date rather than pick it up brand new. I personally think it says a lot more about the game’s marketing than the used game market that not even a beta key was enough to make people take the risk on a new purchase.
Once again for those at the back of the class: The games industry is a business. Businesses have competition. Publishers need to man up and compete with used games, not just sit back and whine because they’re not making an extra million dollars. I find it amazing how some of these businesses conduct themselves without mercy, morality or scruples of any kind, which I can appreciate, but then expect retailers and consumers to show them the sympathy they’ve never shown others.
It doesn’t work both ways.
