Posts tagged losses

Yesterday I went into Gamestation. I occasionally like to peruse that shop and pick out bargain games. Also, I went in to trade my games, to get new (not new new, but new to me) games. All that’s mostly irrelevant, my point is coming. Whilst I was in the shop, making idle chat with the (very pretty) girl stood behind the counter, my mind went to the Metal Gear Solid HD remake, so I asked about it. I was told it was out on Friday, but if I wanted it I would have to pre-order.

Apparently, they don’t stock HD remakes except copies for people who pre-order them. In fact, they didn’t even have any advertisements for it. They had advertisements for FF XIII-2, Mass Effect 3 and SSX, amongst others, but not for a game just about to be released. I found this very strange. Do they not make much money from these sorts of games? Is it that the only people likely to buy this sort of game are people likely to already know it’s coming out and anticipating it weeks beforehand?

I will say that I don’t know whether they meant they didn’t stock the game in all their stores, or just in that one. I will admit, it is a small shop, and the space for new games is very much limited to a few select titles, often with the words “Duty” or “Battlefield” in their title. I suppose that in a larger shop they probably will stock some copies, but I think that this shows that HD remakes maybe don’t sell as well as other games. That’s all speculation though.

I have also heard that there is the possibility that next year Game will go down, meaning there would be no games shops on the highstreet here in Britain anymore. That would be a real shame, since I need used games because I can’t afford to buy all my games new. Although I suppose by then I’d hopefully have a job.

Anyhow, Sony, a company you might have heard of, has just announced its 3^rd quarter takings. They made a loss of $2 billion. An entire $2 billion dollar loss, that’s just an insane amount of money. What makes it even more amazing is that this is on revenue of $20 billion. Over a year that makes $80 billion in turnover. That’s more money than the entire budgets of some countries. The fact that someone can make a loss of that much money just astounds me. Apart from that, I don’t have much to say on this story, because I don’t really know much about business.

My last story to comment on is the fact that Ubisoft is about to start some server maintenance on the 7^th. What with a lot of Ubi games having “always on” DRM,  that means people won’t be able to play their games. Games these people have paid hard cash for.  What I am saying is that this is bullshit. I mean seriously, this is exactly the reason why people straight away said that this system wasn’t going to work. I would suggest anyone that has any of these games cracks them so that the can continue to play.

DRM is a bad idea. All you need is a CD key for online play. DRM is going to get hacked, it’s going to be released onto the various torrent sites, and people are going to pirate it. What you have to make sure of is that you have something to offer paying customers. Multiplayer is one thing. Most games won’t work online if pirated, so you’ll need a new version to play online.  What a waste of money it is to have servers running constantly, and developing the programs and whatnot. How do company execs not realise this?

Anyway, that’s enough for this week, I’ll be back next week with a new post.