Every once in a while people bring up the absurdity of collector's editions.
How lame all the collectibles are, how overpriced the releases are, and how the games sometimes
aren't even isn't included.
It's good for a quick and easy laugh, but I want to talk about something different related
to this today.
Collector's Editions went through a weird transformation the past few years, essentially
playing a different role within the gaming market than back when they started coming
out.
This is video is not an attempt at justifying why these things exist, as I typically don't
like spending more on a game just to get my hands on frivolous things alongside it.
If you personally enjoy all the goodies that come with them, then all the more power to
you.
During the previous generation, when Collector's Editions started to come out for seemingly
every game, with all sorts of weird bonuses that nobody in their right mind really wanted
or needed, they were a pretty blatant way to inflate pricing.
I'm not going to suggest that's not what they're still used for, since that exact same tactic
is still used for Digital Collectors Editions and other weirdly overpriced releases, so
stay with me for a second.
Collector's Editions were a quick way to get a higher revenue stream from a loyal audience
looking forward to the new release in an established franchise, or from a beloved developer.
Much like all the geek toys and collectibles that people use to show their affection towards
brands now, collector's editions were a way for people to put their money were their hearts
are and get that cool extra thing for the release they were waiting for.
The gaming market was still a different place, and lots of companies were still experimenting
with all sorts of business models back then.
Nobody figured out what to do with DLC yet, as this concept of "Selling more of the game
in small chunks later" was foreign to both players and developers alike.
Game rental was in its death throes, and if you were lucky you could still rent your Xbox
360 and PS3 games.
In my experience, all rental places around me were long gone before we entered this generation,
but I still remember seeing people online talk about this being around for them.
It was clear the gaming audience was getting a bit older, and had a little more money,
so the collector's editions started popping up everywhere.
And a new enemy to videogame distribution popped up.
One that had always existed, but now that rental was dead, gaming companies felt the
adrenaline rush to their heads after the kill and decided to find ways to mess with this
other threat that they now saw as the number one problem.
Pira...
Wait no.
Second hand sales.
There might have been a real rise in second hand ownership of games, and if there was,
it likely has to do with both the gaming audience having gotten older, as a lot of pawn shops
need you to be over the age of 18 to trade in things.
And well, the death of rental likely helped this tendency people had to buy games second
hand, beat them, and sell them off again while grabbing another second hand title.
I've known people who did this routinely.
To a point they'd later rebuy games they'd previously sold because they wanted to play
them again.
With how often they did this, I kind of wondered how much extra money they were throwing out
the window not just holding onto those games, but I maybe it might not even have been that
much worse than renting a lot of games.
Either way, second hand sales were now the enemy.
And the enemy had to go.
This is when collector's editions started to push exclusive DLC.
Some going so far as to even do store exclusive DLCs to make sure people buy from certain
stores if they really, really care about having the full experience.
You do care about this game, right?
Then don't buy second-hand.
Then there was all the shit Watch Dogs got with its 500 million special editions with
different additional content.
Or Evolve, which also did this PLUS store exclusive DLCs.
Remember Evolve? Yeah, that sure went well, didn't it?
The anti-second hand sales measure that annoyed me the most, as someone who bought the game
new in store and actually received that content, was Dragon Age: Origin's one where they locked
one of the party members, Shale, behind a download code that came with a new copy of
the game.
It especially bothered me because as I played the game, it became very clear it would be
lesser for not having this character, especially the Dwarf and Deep Roads quests, as it directly
tied into Shale's story.
This is not something you could just cut off from the game, but here we were.
Base game content as a bonus cut away from second-hand sales.
Recently a game I wanted to play did something similar, except it managed to do it in an
even worse form.
The Day One Edition of World of Final Fantasy is the only way to get access to the Japanese
audio track.
The option is always there in the menu, but toggling it without the Day One Edition's
exclusive DLC code just mutes the voicework in the game since you don't have this data.
They're not even selling this separately on the store.
Pretty awful, right?
Now that we've moved to a focus on digital distribution, which by nature doesn't allow
second-hand sales anymore.
We have a new enemy.
Pira...
Sales.
It's not something people generally list as an enemy, but when looking at the way games
are released these days, it's hard not to see most of the early marketing push being
to solely diminish the effects of them.
This is where we come back to special editions and their function on the market place.
The current role of special editions of games is a lot like what GOG did when they got their
start.
If you've seen the videos about them on Noclip, people in Poland didn't know better regarding
piracy, thinking those burned flea market game copies they were buying were legitimate,
so they competed against it by delivering this special release filled with goodies and
bonuses.
A special edition is basically competing against the digital copy of itself.
And while this sounds strange, a game competing against itself, it's because it totally is
and it's not the only thing factoring in here.
Since we've moved to digital releases, we've also started an age of constant sales on all
the competing distribution networks.
Indies often complain about how there's a race to the bottom regarding pricing, but
now imagine how much worse it is with triple a titles when you see their titles go as low
as often they do, and how much faster they keep reaching that lowered price this generation.
Games are devaluing at a rapid pace lately, and there's a lot of reasons for that as well.
The biggest reason being sales for games dropping off quickly after the launch window closes.
So any abnormal change in the game's pricing, like lowering it, or putting it in a bundle,
is going to move numbers by a lot.
Do this frequently enough, and you can pad your sales numbers for a series or game entry
a long time later, pointing at the success of it without bringing up how much individual
copies moved for.
Even to this day, in the age of rapid price lowerings and game bundles for a dollar, people
still point to individuals copies sold or shipped as a conclusive number for the success
of a game, and you can be sure game companies prefer it this way because every game's sales
looks a lot more impressive that way.
And when nearly everyone is doing it, well, you kind of have to join in to catch up with
those flashy sales numbers from everyone else, right?
Plus the games aren't selling that well after launch window anymore, so you're not losing
money on this game if you lower the price now.
Those investors really like seeing those numbers go up too and if they're not going up, they
might leave you for one of those companies that do produce those increased numbers.
The actual big revenue numbers will continue to come in from the new full prices releases,
but getting those big numbers are going to be nice when you want to push for a sequel
because that old one sold so, so well.
Except, this creates a new problem.
When everyone is sure a game is going to sell for half the price of launch within 3 months,
a lot of people are going to hold off buying it.
A lot of these people could have been your hardcore audience that would have bought your
game at launch if this later drop didn't happen.
You need to give them new reasons to buy the game on launch.
Like small print runs of special editions.
Or prints of Day One Editions, preferably in nicer looking game cases with that box
art the fans would normally scream at you for not putting on the regular cover.
You know the one.
The one that doesn't look like trash.
Maybe throw some special content in there.
Like... locking the Japanese voice track for your weeb game solely to the Day One Edition,
so anyone who wants to play the game with the original voices is going to have to get
that one single release and hope they printed too many of these to ever run out of them.
(I hate you so much Square)
In this kind of market, the special edition takes a new role.
They're not just for the die-hard fans anymore, and they're not just to stop the indirect
sales anymore.
They're in direct competition with a company's own race to the bottom sales strategy.
Of course how cynical you get about this depends on the company, as some gaming companies do
that weird thing where they sell the special edition without any game under the belief
that "Maybe some people will want a digital copy of the game instead" forgetting that
they couldn't just put in a key to validate the game for a system of choice in there.
But I guess they're afraid people will get the key and sell it on a shady key reselling
site.
Which is a problem in and of itself, since there needs to be some level of trust between
companies and their players, and everything I've just discussed already spells out a great
level of inherent mistrust.
Though if we really want to talk about that, we should be talking about DRM implementation.
Which is not today's topic.
Though one weird thing to me is that if game companies are too afraid to give players digital
keys, why do so many of these companies give free keys of games with GPUs, keyboards, and
other expensive gaming hardware?
I mean, we know why they pack the games with those, it's to pad the sales numbers of a
title and make the launch look all that more impressive.
But this especially in combination with not even putting a digital key in a super expensive
special edition is a bit...
Baffling to say the least.
There's another major reason companies have to push these special editions, and the day
one editions the way they do.
The launch day experience of most games suck now.
Previously it was because of the day one patch problem, where increasingly big day one patches
full of bug fixes were pushed out the door.
This was because the tail-end of the crunch-filled development cycle in order to meet the deadline
had the developers printing Gold versions that they probably wouldn't want to call the
Gold version themselves.
These days we get rebalance patches, content patches, rereleases featuring these content
patches, content patches on top of these rereleases that are supposed to have all the patches
as a complete product already.
If you're someone who plays through a game once and then moves one, there is no reason
for you to play anything on launch anymore, unless it's a multiplayer focused game and
you want to be part of the early rush when the game is new and everyone is trying to
learn it.
I mean,
There's no reason unless you don't want the nicer boxart.
Or you don't like this art book and soundtrack.
Or you don't want this statue of the publisher's CEO while holding a replica of your wallet
in his hand.
But you want these things, so you buy the First Day Edition, and the Special Edition.
You get both of these.
Because the alternative, the digital release?
What if the servers go down?
At least if you have the disc, you could still play the game.
In its Gold release buggy state without a Day One Patch, sure, but at least you have
some form of the game later down the line.
Now, I'm not going to say you should never preorder to get your Day One Edition.
Or that you should never get a Special Edition of anything.
I'd be a hypocrite if I said these things.
As much as I dislike a lot of the practices around the marked up releases, and the way
they're positioned to stop a race to the bottom started by the same people selling you this
stuff, I think it is perfectly fine to spend your money on the thing you want, if you know
it's what you want.
Most of buying products on a market is a fight between what you're willing to pay as a consumer
to get what you want from a publisher.
You're both at odds with each to some degree.
I just hope people become more aware of the position of the what and why of these special
releases in the current day market.
Most people's understanding of their function dates back to a generation ago.
And it'll be interested to see how the focus and use will shift as gaming changes in the
coming years.
I'm really looking forward to those exclusive subscription content rental schemes we're
sure to move to if we do go the streaming service route publishers have been glorifying
for us lately.
That will be a fun time.
Anyway, this was AboveUp...
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