The Video Game Revue

Game Publishers are Being Idiots

This is a little off-topic, but I need to get a little rant off of my chest. What the heck are game publishers thinking? Once Ikaruga was $30, then suddenly it became "rare" and is now practically impossible to find. Disgaea was once similarly "rare," then they printed a whole bunch of copies, but they all sold out and now it is "rare" again. I remember people panicking over Suikoden III going the way of Suikoden II and becoming "rare"--people sold copies on eBay for $60+, but then they printed another run and suddenly it was $30 for a brand new copy. What leads to this kind of stupidity?

"Hey Bob, check it out--some kids are selling copies of that funny Suki-dooki game on eBay for a lot of money."
"Huh. Well, let's print some more copies."
"Hey, uh, what about that Suik-dooki II game? People are buying that one for a lot more."
"Oh that--that's just some old PlayStation 1 crap. We don't bother with that anymore."

Meanwhile, RPG fans all over America weep.

Okay, okay--back up a second here. Let's say you want to buy a music CD that was a huge hit back in the 60's, like, I dunno--I wasn't born yet--let's say something by The Beatles. Guess what? You can walk into any music store with a reasonable selection and find most or all of The Beatles most popular albums. Fancy that. What if you want a CD that wasn't such a classic but had a bit of a following, like some crappy Poison album or something. There's a good chance you'll find that too. In fact, they have CDs from all kinds of different time eras. Do you know why? Because as long as people keep buying them, they keep printing them!

Actually, I don't really understand the whole logistics of the thing--there are probably legal issues and other stuff that I'm not aware of. But there is a painfully obvious difference. If you want to go out and buy a copy of Parappa the Rapper (hey, I love that game!) or even Crash Bandicoot, or most of the most popular games from the last 15 years, you simply can't. They don't bother to print them anymore--not even for systems like the PlayStation 1 which are technically still supported (you can play them on your PS2). Or, heck, they could easily port all of the NES and SNES games to GameCube, for example. If the open-source software community can develop NES and SNES emulators for free, how hard can it be for a big corp like Nintendo?

I dunno about you, but my local EB Games store is pretty small compared to a lot of the local music stores. There's an HMV music store in my city that's the size of a small department store, with a selection to match. Why wouldn't something like that work for video game stores? Why can't I buy old copies of classic games? And why do game publishers let good GBA games, RPGs, and various fringe genre games always run out of stock? It's common sense that they're losing tons of money on sales simply because a lot of gamers can't easily find some game titles that they really want.

posted by Parappa @ 2:53 PM