Talk to Thomas if you want actual numbers, but the overwhelming majority of AAA games have fairly predictable sales curves with a peak window measured in weeks or, in some cases, days. See also books, movies, music, etc.
Evergreen content is highly anomalous in creative industries.
Yep, big games are horrendously front-loaded and with very short legs (you can see that if you follow sales threads at e.g. Neogaf).
This is why DRMs which technically "fail" (they fall in, say, 2 weeks) have performed admirably, and as asked/required: for two weeks, where 90% of the game's sales happen, pirated games were not competition.
This is why I can only shake my head in disbelief when people claim DRMs fail as a DRM finally gets cracked 1 month after a game release: as far as publishers are concerned, a DRM which lasted 4~5 weeks has performed way beyond the call of duty, and you can be sure their next game will be using the same breed of DRM.
If a AAA title doesn't move 1 million copies in opening week, the studio is going to be in trouble either directly financially, or with the publisher (see: Mirror's Edge).
Everyone is fully aware of the ridiculousness of where the market is right now.
This I much prefer the path many MMO's have taken or a game like TF2, continue to add over time to keep a solid value proposition for years to come rather than the 2 weeks after it comes out.
Old game mags used to have a metric called "replayability". Games with poor re-playability were dinged by the gaming press as offering low-value for the dollar to the gamer. I'm just wondering if the Movie style approach offers similar low-value for the dollar for the game makers in terms of the amount of money required to advertise to gamers for every AAA title that comes out the door, only to throw all that work away next month. It's almost like the industry is pumping out Mandalas, then sweeping them away.
Heck Mega Man (Rock Man) has had 7 or 8 games with virtually the same artwork (the most expensive part of game production). A modern developer might look at this and say "we'll just release a MegaMan game and every year release more enemies with more stages, weapons and bosses that just figure into the main release."
(I'm thinking Mega Man of course because I'm in the process of replaying through the series again and Capcom is losing millions from the PSN nonsense).
I guess what I'm rambling about is that there has to be a better way for the studios and the gamers to find better value in terms of longevity on both the development costs and the purchase price of the games -- and tying the games to a transient online auth system isn't going to do it.
To everyone except hardcore gamers the current release method is probably very tiring, as in I might pick up a new game and play it for a few months at the rate I play games. In that time so many of these big titles would have come out.
It also means once these releases drop off best seller lists they quickly become unloved. I've seen big bugs and game mechanics issue that just never get fixed I guess because most of the sales have already happened.
Sony is all-too-familiar with people pirating games on their consoles. Online authorization eliminates huge swaths of pirates.
Most consumers aren't thinking about 10 years from now when they buy. They're thinking about getting their dopamine fix RIGHT NOW. And online authorization makes them give up their CC# to get it.
And anecdotally, the activation has pretty much stopped casual sneakerware piracy. People don't loan out their Windows CDs like they used to.
Games like those published by Ubisoft do this on PC, and when it goes down, they say "well, if only you guys didn't pirate our games all the time, we wouldn't have to abuse you this way." And, to be honest, they have a point, because PC game piracy is out of control.
No-one thinks online authorization is great. It pisses off legitimate customers and it's another service you have to run. It's not like the publishers are really getting anything tangible out of it bar the hope that their games won't be pirated to all hell (they will be).
I would like it if games/consoles had a kill switch on them, so that after x years they no longer require an authorization in case the service goes away, but I highly doubt that will happen.
No, they do not have a point. I bought Settlers 7, shortly after release, for full price. I couldn't play it. My internet connection at the time would "blip" every ten minutes or so, it would go down for a couple of seconds and come back up. Every time this happened I got kicked out of my game.
The next Ubisoft game that came out, I pirated. Why? Because the pirated version of Settlers 7 /works/. If I'm paying something, I expect a better experience than I would get if I didn't pay. To me, that seems like a fairly basic tenet of economics.
Many game companies "get it". Valve for example provide me with unending streams of new content for games I have paid for, even going as far as giving me a free copy of Portal 2. Thanks Valve! You win money.
Companies like Epic have basically gone out on the record and said "we stopped supporting PC because of piracy." If you were a publisher, what would you do? There are precious few successes of games without DRM, and remember that all Steam games are also DRM'd.
I /think/ there are 360 titles that do this, at least to some content.
It's not something that the console makers do themselves.
[edit, spelling]
My PS3 has been working fine since the PSN went offline. Actually, it's been disconnected from the internet (for unrelated reasons) since long before that. All my games play fine. All my blu-ray discs play fine. I have no reason to suspect that they will not continue to work decades from now should I choose to keep them that long.
"This is What Irony Tastes Like: Capcom and the PSN Outage" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539591
ebay can get too expensive REALLY quickly. emulators are legal, but the games I would play on them are definitely pirated. That, and I have to deal with a control scheme the game wasn't designed to be played on. virtual consoles offer pretty much the exact experience as the real thing, and they're affordable.
So, yeah, I'd much rather pay for a Virtual Console than go out and buy hardware which is older than me.
I'm still playing Atari 2600 games, decades later, because they still work. Tying down use to a single-point-of-failure-authorization-system guarantees that your investment in creative works has a short shelf life. But most gamers know at least what the original Super Mario Bros theme song sounds like as coming from an NES.