Recycling games

Brace yourself, my friends, for a rant.
Saw an interesting piece this week at The Escapist about the importance of used-game sales in keeping computer/video game shops like EBGames and Gamestop alive. Here’s a rather eye-opening factoid:

GameStop executives describe this as a “margin growth” business – because they make a much higher profit margin on the sale of every used game than they do on the comparable sale of a new game. And in the highly competitive retail trade, margins matter. How much?
“Used games are keeping the entire ship afloat,” a vice-president of marketing for Electronics Boutique tells me. “EB and GameStop make basically no money from new product.”

Huh. I always failed to keep my lemonade stand running, but that doesn’t strike me as a stellar business model. And then there’s stuff like this:

Throughout most of the entertainment and media industry, when publishers want to make sure first-run entertainment sells in droves to the public, they charge what’s called “sellthrough prices” – and for virtually every form of media, including books, movies and music, that price is between $15 and $25. You can get the brand-new Feast for Crows hardcover for $16.80, the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith DVD for $17.98, and Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor for $18.98.
But you have to pay $49.99 for Perfect Dark Zero, or any other new release videogame. In comparison to its closest substitutes from other industries, videogaming isn’t priced to sell through.
And yet, selling through is the one thing a videogame must do. Videogames suffer from the shortest shelf life of any media.

My knowledge of large-scale economics is limited to what I learned in my high-school civics class, but it seems to me (and it’s seemed clear for a while now, actually) that there is a serious shakeup coming for the computer/video game industry. Full-priced sequels and retreads are released within a year of the original titles. Prices of new games are ludicrously high, enough so that this sad old game addict purchased only a handful of new titles in all of 2005 and will likely purchase even fewer in 2006. Even with $50 price stickers, margins are apparently so low that your local Gamestop has to hawk used games to squeak by. Where games were once programmed by nerds in their basements with too much spare time and a cool idea, they’re now cranked out by gigantic corporate teams with Hollywood-scale budgets. The latest round of consoles cost Joe Gamer a small fortune to actually purchase (and the games are sold separately!) but don’t, to my eyes at least, offer anything remotely resembling gameplay that is more fun than what I used to play on my NES.
People have been ranting about this for a while–Greg Costikyan railed rather gloriously about this last year–and you’re always hearing that direct-download game distribution (like Steam) is going to break down the current whacked-out game creation/distribution system, and every year people predict that the game industry is on the brink of another 1983-esque crash… but the months roll on, and the sequels are churned out, and the games still cost $50 (edging towards $60 now!), and old-timers like myself continue to gaze through rose-tinted nostalgia at the Commodore 64 gathering dust in the back corner of the closet.
Can’t say I have a point here, but it felt good to rant a bit. Now to go drown my gaming sorrows in the blood of my (online) enemies.

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Playing with feeds

I’ve been playing around with my blog feeds–specifically, I’m toying with using FeedBurner in conjunction with my blog. To that end, I’ve got a new feed you can use for my blog which incorporates my flickr photos and del.icio.us links as well as normal blog posts. If you want to try it out, plug this link into your feed reader of choice:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheStagingPoint
(If you aren’t familiar with blog/RSS feeds, take a moment to read about ’em–you’ll thank me later, I promise.)
If you’d prefer your feed to contain only posts, as is the usual custom for blog feeds, that feed is still available. Links to both are down at the bottom left of the blog.
I’m mostly playing around with this to see how it works, and so I’d appreciate it if you tried out the new FeedBurner link and let me know what you think. It’s quite possible I’ve broken things in the course of meddling with the feeds, so if you notice any problems or annoyances with the new or old feeds, please let me know.

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Histori-wife

Scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, and see if you spot a certain familiar name! Let’s just say that our humble apartment has of late been stacked with even more books about the ancient Mediterranean world than usual.
Class starts next week! Good luck, beautiful!

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“…a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity”

Why, you ask, is Hawthorne ranked among the greatest of American writers? Because he finds room in his prose for quotes like this:

“Where is it, then?” asked Hilda. “I never peeped into it.”
“Wait, and it will open for you,” replied her friend. “The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage scenery amid which we tread.”

From The Marble Faun. Simply glorious.

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New Year’s Miscellanea

Happy New Year! I hope your New Year’s Eve celebrations were as riotous as ours. We got together with some friends and played Im Schatten Des Kaisers, a boardgame that Michele and I bought in Germany. We were armed with a crude English translation of the rulebook, but it still took us a few turns before we were correctly identifying all of the playing pieces. (Turns out it’s an excellent game–very strategic, in the vein of Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne.)
You know you’re getting old when it’s 11:00 on New Year’s Eve and you’re ready to pack it in. That’s right–we didn’t even stay up late enough to witness the Dropping of the Ball (a ceremony the appeal of which has always eluded me). One of our friends had a sermon to deliver at church the next morning, and you don’t want the pastor dozing off during the service. So we called it a successful New Year’s Eve.
Oh, and in other exciting New Year’s news, I played around with the theme and layout here on the ol’ blog. Gone is the Squad Leader visual theme, although it’s sure to return at some point given my fondness for it.
Hope your New Year is off to a good start!

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Welcome to the world of Warcraft

It was with some trepidation that I took my first uncertain steps into the wide wide World of Warcraft. An entire online world, waiting to be explored–quests to undertake, magical artifacts to discover, exotic locales to visit.
Questions gripped me as I logged in, created my character, and ventured out into the icy mountain wastes of Dun Morogh, south of the bustling dwarven city of Ironforge. Around me, a jaw-dropping diversity of interesting characters darted to and fro–dedicated players going about their adventurous business.
How would I adjust to the intense online interaction required by such an ambitious gameworld? Could my dwarf paladin, through hours of hard work, sacrifice, and valiant struggles against the forces of the Horde, achieve the respect and even the admiration of this community of online Warcraft veterans?
Wait–there’s a group of gnomes over there. Maybe they can answer a few questions for an inexperienced newbie player. What’s that, you say?


…oh.
I thought this place seemed familiar. Beneath the gorgeous graphical game interface, it’s the same ol’ internet I know and love.
This, I think I can handle.

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It’s popular, and people like it… let’s cancel it!

Looks like the beginning of the end for Arrested Development, the only reason to even bother owning a television these days. It looks like it’s falling victim to the TV networks’ usual logic: stumble across a show that’s actually excellent, then under-promote it, put it in a time slot so as to get it pre-empted by every conceivable sports event from baseball to curling, continually cut episodes from the season; then just give up.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.

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