About a month or so ago I decided to buy Need for Speed: Underground. I’d never actually owned the game, but after watching Tokyo Drift (terrible, I know), I was compelled to play a street racing game. As I do with older titles, I went around to my local GameStops looking for a complete copy, and after finding nothing but crap for the longest time I finally happened upon a copy that (by GameStop standards) appeared to be in great shape.
Unfortunately, this is what greeted me when I opened the box:
To show the flip side of this, allow me to hold up my limited edition copy of Chu Chu Rocket for Dreamcast that I bought in Osaka, Japan.
One thing you’ll notice right away is the effort put into protecting the game. It’s been sealed in plastic, but not shrink-wrapped; instead, tougher (harder) plastic has been wrapped, folded, and taped onto the game as to protect it from dirt and moisture. Is this completely necessary? Probably not, but it does insure that the product you’re going to get is the same one that was sold to the store (that is, it has not degraded) and also shows the customer that the store cares as much as they do about games.
As you can see, everything is included and kept complete. And even though I bought it solely for the orange controller and don’t really need another copy of Chu Chu Rocket, it makes me happy that the set was kept together and the box not discarded. On the other hand, an American retailer like GameStop would have most likely bought the items as separate, discarded any external packaging, and sold the pieces individually; I remember buying GameCube dance pads for cheap after DDR Mario Mix had been out for a while, but passing on the game because it was priced above retail. Eventually, I did end up with a copy of the game, but it only made me wonder how may copies of the game were out there that had no corresponding pads because people had bought them separately….
---
So the question then becomes, what is different between Japanese gamers and American gamers that is creating this disparity in treatment and expectations of used games? I suppose part of this has to do with the business models and ideologies of game stores in both countries. In the United States, games are viewed as just that, games… and stores that have attempted to deal in them as something different, like FuncoLand, end up succumbing in the end. Most Americans don’t see games as being a collectable, and to them the ends justify the means… that is, if there is a game being played on their television set after they place the disc in their console, it doesn’t matter if the disc is scratched to hell and it’s come in a generic DVD case. And maybe it isn’t that Japanese gamers, on the whole, are much different… what is different, though, is the ones who are collectors (in the true sense of the word) are putting their money where their mouth is and keeping these businesses alive.
Jeremy Parish brought up two good points as to why this whole disparity between gaming cultures may have occurred. The first is that Japan is a much smaller country, and thus it’s much more practical to have stores that deal is specialized goods because they’re servicing a much smaller geographical footprint and a much denser population. It’s much more likely that a store like Super Potato will do well in Osaka or Tokyo than in a similar sized American city because not only do they see customers who live within their city, but because the country is not that big and relatively easy to travel around, clients from other towns as well. The second is that “Japanese gamers tend to pour a lot more money and attention into the things they enjoy… they tend to focus on single subjects into which they plunge deeply,” which further explains why these kinds of businesses are able to thrive in Japan and also why they deal in the quality of goods that they do. The irony of both of these points is that the United States has both more space to warrant such stores (and private collections) as well as a higher per capita income and lower cost of living when compared to Japan.
Personally, I’d love to see more stores like Play-N-Trade and (local favorite) Games 4 Less open and do well for themselves. And while I know the future of game collecting (at least in America) is going to be done primarily online, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s important to me to be able to go into a store and comb through the aisles and piles of games, and stumble upon something that I’d forgotten about… and be able to buy it and play it then and there. For me, games are still as much a toy as they are a collectable, and part of their draw is bringing me back to a time when I could spend hours in a Kay-Bee looking at the rows and rows of NES game boxes hanging on their pull-tabs behind the counter, harassing the clerk to let me look at the back of just one more game because I was pretty sure that was the one I wanted to get. As an adult, I want to be able to buy those games and experience them in the same way I would have as a child... from opening the box, reading the manual, to playing the game, it's all part of the attraction.
Log in to comment