EDITORIAL: THQ Making a Serious Mistake
- Scribbled on August 24th, 2010 by Jordan Lund
- Filed in Editorial Content, Industry News, Interviews, WTF
THQ is the latest company to take an antagonistic stance against customers who have the temerity to buy used copies of their games. Following the lead of Electronic Arts, THQ will be including a one time use only code which unlocks key portions of a game, like, oh, online play. Should you buy a used copy of their upcoming Smackdown Vs. Raw 2011 then you will need to pay an additional fee, on top of what you may already be paying for Xbox Live or Playstation Plus, in order to take the title online.
Worse, if you aren’t happy about the situation, THQ is on record saying they don’t care. Cory Ledesma, THQ’s creative director for wrestling games, explained the company line in an interview with CVG.
“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. That’s a little blunt but we hope it doesn’t disappoint people. We hope people understand that when the game’s bought used we get cheated.”
Let me explain what is going to happen, for the benefit of suits who still don’t know how this stuff works: When you have a game that comes out with a new edition every year your fans re-sell last years copy to partially finance this years copy.
If you take away a fundamental aspect of the game, such as online play, from used copies, you aren’t incentivizing people to buy new – you’re encouraging them to not buy your game AT ALL. Why?
Well, game stores aren’t going to buy back games that are crippled because they don’t want to be bothered with complaints. Nobody is going to buy a game new if they are going to get grief when they try to re-sell it. Stores, that make a large profit on used games, won’t be inclined to order new copies of your titles for the same reason. What this policy is, long term, is the gamimg equivalent of cutting off the nose to spite one’s face.
September 5th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
GamerHusbands have an opinion on this.