Cory Ledesma, the Creative Director for the Wrestling genre at THQ, told gamers that buying used games is cheating THQ out of money and they won’t stand for it anymore. Of course, if all of their games were awesome, there wouldn’t be people buying them used as no one would sell them. Again, if the games were reasonably priced the same situation would exist. But in the real world, not all of their games are awesome, nor are they reasonably priced. CVG recently reported the comments. 
"I don’t think we really care whether used game buyers are upset because new game buyers get everything. So if used game buyers are upset they don’t get the online feature set I don’t really have much sympathy for them."
You would think from the poor quality of many wrestling games, that they obviously don’t care about new game buyers either. How many wrestling games have sucked? Far more than have rocked as far as I’m concerned and most of them haven’t been worth the retail price, so perhaps if he wasn’t so busy whining about being cheated (sounds just like an immature gamer, doesn’t it?) and got to work making awesome wrestling games, then he wouldn’t have to worry so much about people buying them second hand.
Already in the works...
THQ is already taking steps to stop people from buying a used game and then having access to all the features. Of course, if the game sucks and we never enter the one-time code they are packaging with games, well...you can still sell it with that code, now can’t you?
"I don’t think anyone wants that [THQ getting cheated] (I wouldn’t be so sure, as many gamers feel cheated quite often) so in order for us to make strong, high-quality WWE games we need loyal fans that are interested in purchasing the game. We want to award (sic) those fans with additional content."
Well, the fans who want those games are also still waiting for a string of consecutive "strong, high-quality WWE games." I just stopped playing them personally. After the horribleness that was Legends of Wrestlemania and several other titles from past years...
You might recall the 3.0/10 that I gave in the WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010 Review (iPhone) or perhaps the whopping 4.0./10 that was handed out on WWE Legends of WrestleMania Review (iPhone). Of course, back in November of last year our own Jim Cook offered a 7.5/10 on his WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010 Review (Xbox 360), so there is certainly some promise in the series.
Sure, a 7.5/10 is a decent score. Strong and high-quality? I think Jim used "a competent wrestling game..." in his overall write up of it.
Their solution is to give out one-time access codes to unlock features. In WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2011 that will include the first DLC pack.
3 days ago
Interesting topic. I’d like to chime in on a few different points:
- As for THQ, it’s worth noting that a lot of their money appears to be tied up in licensing. A huge portion of their game roster is based on popular franchises. Not just pro wrestling, but other lines too. As is usually the case with licensed titles, these have been pretty hit-or-miss in quality, with only a few landing squarely in "competent and decent, but not great or bad" territory. I suspect this, combined with their tendency to do yearly releases, results in some of their games being "disposable entertainment" and possibly scaring off some customers accordingly.
- To comment on your question about "how many map packs at 2 maps for $5 will people buy?", that depends. How good are the maps? To use a recent example, BlazBlue recently added a DLC character, Makoto Nanaya for $7-$8 (depending on whether you get PS3 or Xbox 360 version). That’s definitely controversial, but I felt it was money well spent because I deeply enjoyed the high-speed "rush-down mix-up" game plan she encourages. If the extra content is really good, I’ll gladly pony up the extra money for it since I think it adds more life to a game at a low cost.
On the other hand, BlazBlue also offers alternate announcers for $5 apiece and I can’t justify buying those, especially most (not all, but most) of them do a very bad job. Perhaps someone wants these announcers, but to me it’s a rip-off. It’s definitely a case of both "how good is the content?" and "who will this appeal to?"
- Regarding publishers being "greedy", it’s worth noting that to an extent, that’s precisely what they’re supposed to be doing. Granted, there’s a point where profit-seeking goes so far that some people become uncomfortable, and if a company ever goes too far it could easily backfire on them when they’re outright called "greedy and evil" by their target audience. It’s definitely a fine line to walk. Some publishers do perhaps take a flying leap over that line however...
- It’s really interesting to note that the publishers making the most fuss about used game sales are the bigger ones. You don’t see the likes of Atlus, Aksys, Telltale (granted Telltale is mostly doing digital distribution) and so on losing much sleep over this. I won’t even venture a guess as to why this is, but it does indeed seem that smaller publishers worry less about this than bigger ones do.
- The idea of a "one dollar kickback to the publisher" or similar is... interesting, but probably more as an academic exercise than anything truly worth considering. I can’t think of any other industry where one does that sort of thing with used merchandise, but if there is an industry that works like that I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
- On a final note, being able to afford the game new is definitely a big deal. Some readers I have regular contact with can only afford one or two new games a month. Sometimes that’s not even a retail game, but a WiiWare/PSN/XBLA download. They have to make their money stretch as far as possible due to our current economy. I suspect that we’ll both continue to see healthy sales for used games as a result, and "hours of game play" will become an increasingly important metric to some.