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Gamestop = even worse than I thought
shmokes:
That doesn't account for it. 360 games are forgotten . . . really great 360 games are forgotten within months. Not just when a new system is released, but when those games are still perfectly viable on the latest-gen hardware. This does not happen to movies. Movies continue selling well, and sit on the new release shelves for a long time, often well over a year. And even when they leave the new release shelf, they remain viable at retail. Things like Hitch and Spiderman and Narnia are still doing very well at retail. And it's not just the select few movies that transcend regular market forces. For christ's sake, I mentioned Hitch. I'm talking about good movies and bad movies alike.
I've been thinking about it, and I figure it probably has more to do with the time investment than anything else. A movie is only an hour and a half or so of your time. You're likely to watch it multiple times over the years. But a game represents such a big time investment that most of us are forced to be very selective. So we tend to select whatever is has been put on our radar by the media, which is whatever is new. This doesn't explain books, so much, since books involve a similar time investment. But maybe books simply have a MUCH larger audience. And, of course, there's never really a presumption that newer books will have better technology under the hood than older books. That probably does play into it, I guess.
shmokes:
--- Quote from: shmokes on April 03, 2008, 11:44:53 am ---
But maybe books simply have a MUCH larger audience. And, of course, there's never really a presumption that newer books will have better technology under the hood than older books. That probably does play into it, I guess.
--- End quote ---
Selective distortion? I don't think so. I already acknowledged the larger audience. That doesn't account for it. Companies are not just interested in profits. They're interested in relative profits. Shelf-space is finite, and movies are released with at least the regularity as games. The size of the market is largely irrelevant. If one DVD is more marketable than another, it wins the shelf-space battle. In videogames that is based almost entirely on release date. New titles completely displace old titles. The old titles disappear entirely off of peoples' radars. And by old, I mean within 6 months more often than not.
Dartful Dodger:
Games hold up to the test of time. PacMan or an "arcade classics" put on a PS2 CD(when PS2s were the cutting edge) sold for full-price and people paid for it. They even sell out dated games like Mortal Kombat that plug into your TV.
The key point is those classic movies are on DVDs. There haven't been to many advances in book technology since Don Quixote was first written. In fact if monks were writing the books by hand I don't think too many people would pay the thousands of dollars they'd cost. I also don't think the Beta versions of Wizard of Oz are flying off the shelves and an 8 track of Pink Floyd from the 70s might be worth something, but if they made an 8 track of it now it wouldn't be worth anything.
It’s all a matter of timing. PS2 games are flooding Game Stop and nobody’s buying them. A friend of mine traded in his PS2 console, games and peripherals a couple of months before the release of PS3. They gave him enough credit to buy a PS3. He still says he was raped, but he figured he wouldn't have been able to unload them after the release.
AtomSmasher:
A good part of shelf space seems to be devoted to "Greatest Hits" titles, or best selling games more then a year old. Once popular titles more then 6 months old don't get forgotten until the console is obsolete, they just get moved a little farther down the shelf.
shmokes:
--- Quote from: pinballjim on April 03, 2008, 12:04:39 pm ---And you completely ignored the format comment.
--- End quote ---
Um . . . no I didn't. Look at the very last thing that I said in the post you were responding to. I also made this point earlier with a list of great Xbox 360 games that may as well not even exist anymore. I'm not just talking about games from older systems, though I am talking about that too.
And while it's easy to use that argument in the console space, how do you account for it in the PC market? A PC (though this has changed somewhat with Vista) can largely play any game released in the last 20 years. Yet exactly the same dynamic applies.
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