What Buying a Video Game and Buying a Car Have In Common [Buying It Forward]

About a year ago, my friend Jason decided to sell the stoller he had gotten when his son was born.  He sold it on eBay for $138.  Considering he said he had bought it for $250 at Babies ‘R’ Us, I was shocked at how much he was able to get for a 2+ year old stroller.  He joked about how he just left the money in his PayPal account and used it towards buying Christmas presents for his son.  See, Jason had not expected to ’salvage’ 50% of the purchase price of his stroller.  He was actually reluctant to even sell it on eBay, because he wasn’t sure if he would lose money on it once he paid for shipping.  Jason had not planned on buying it forward.

On the flip side, GameStop has grown into a $3.2 billion company by riding the Buy-It-Forward Express.  Their business model is dependent upon gamers bringing in their old video games and exchanging them for credit towards another game.  GameStop can then resell the exchanged games (which they just obtained at a steep discount) to other games.  But this is not a new concept.  For decades, people have been trading in their cars and driving away in new ones.

What makes the concept of “buying it forward” a new concept is that the market for used goods is much more liquid than it once was and that consumers can now factor in the ’salvage’ value of their items into their purchasing decisions–must like a car’s resell value.  Car buyers consider future resell value when making a purchasing decision.  Companies like BMW have built up stellar reputation, largely because of how well BMW cars retain their value.

There has long been an established secondary market for cars, but secondary markets have recently begun opening for a wide range of other products, such as strollers and video games.  As the secondary market begins to stabilize and market prices begin to settle into a groove, many consumers will begin to factor the resell value into their buying decisions.  For instance, video game buyers may buy a game with the expectation of reselling/trading it in for a certain percentage.  Certain genres or game publishers may be known to have lower resell values, and this could negatively impact their sales.  Throw in the fact that this also means a discount to second hand buyers, and many consumers may make the decision to wait and buy a used copy at a large discount.

This is currently just speculation based upon my anecdotal evidence, but the concept of buying it forward is one that I plan on exploring in great detail over the coming months.



REVIEW: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360)

If there is one thing that can be said about Infinity Ward, it is that they love taking the shooter formula to new levels, and Modern Warfare 2 is no exception.  Like its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the latest installment successfully pushes the boundaries of competitive multiplayer in innovative and compelling ways.  Unlike the first game, though, Modern Warfare 2's single player experience stumbles under the weight of its story and feels like little more than a series of unrelated set pieces.  What truly sets MW2 apart, however, is its incredibly executed co-op missions.

Since the vast majority of hours played will be in the multiplayer mode, it makes sense to begin there.  After a disappointing debut on home consoles, few expected the Call of Duty franchise to overtake the Halo series as the most played multiplayer game on home consoles, but Modern Warfare combined excellent shooting with a persistent ranking system in a way that made it impossible to ignore.  The system has worked so well that the game is still in the top 10 Xbox Live games played every week, so there was not too much for Infinity Ward to 'fix.'  Instead, Modern Warfare 2 introduces new features while leaving the core multiplayer intact.  The game feels instantly familiar.  

Weapons fire the same, pulling the left trigger still snaps the sight to the nearest target, and completing challenges still results in a heavy metal riff design specifically (so it seems) to make you feel like a badass.  Within a few rounds, though, you start to see the changes.  For me, this realization took the form of a sentry gun mowing me down as I walked out of a window.  For others it might be seeing a teammate shoot down a UAV or order a "care package."  Other changes are less readily apparent, such as the introduction of "deathstreaks."  Die too many times in a row, and you drop a grenade or spawn with temporarily increased health.  Others still have quickly become annoying gameplay ruiners, especially the new javelin and double shotgun equips.

These are just a few examples of the smart improvements Infinity Ward made to the multiplayer formula, but what truly redefines the online game is the higher level of customization available to player.  While there are new perks, weapons and other unlockables, the biggest advance may be the introduction of customizable killstreak rewards.  Instead of simply unlocking a UAV, an airstrike or a helicopter at certain killstreak counts, you now can pick and choose which killstreaks you will have access to in a match.  Luckily, they are well balanced, you can choose to have a guidable missile or a Harrier jet, but it might come at the expense of a deployable UAV or care package.  If you want to put all your eggs in one basket, you can even choose to detonate a tactical nuke if you get 25 kills without dying, killing everyone and ending the round.  This is both as epic and as silly as it sounds, but if you can get 25 kills in a row without the aid of any other killstreak bonuses, you have earned the right to gloat a little.  It is worth noting that the nuke is incredibly rare; in several hundred games, I only saw it happen once, very early on.

If the multiplayer game can be somewhat summed up in "Dude, you can detonate a nuke," the single player game can be summed up in "Dude, they shot a nuke at a nuke to stop a nuke from nuking something."  Before you scream about me spoiling the game for you, let me assure you that I did no such thing.  I have played the game three times through and STILL have no idea what is happening.  In fact, the more I played it the less sense it made, so if anyone has any spoilers, PLEASE send them my way.  The strength of the first Modern Warfare game's story was that it kept you on edge with shocking story twists.  After detonating a nuke in the first game, though, Infinity Ward seems to have been worried about the stakes seeming lower in the sequel.  So, they overcompensated.  Some of the last scenes in the game could have been some of the most gripping sequences in shooter history, but by the time you get there just about nothing could surprise you, least of all a helicopter crash.  By the end of the game, there will have been so many twists that you'll double check too see whether or not you had just played Tom Clancey's Modern Warfare 2.

Speaking of Tom Clancey, there is a reason why Infinity Ward wanted to drop the Call of Duty from the title of Modern Warfare 2.  Call of Duty has always been about the heroism of soldiers who chose to fight for their families and country, but MW2 almost seems to take the exact opposite approach and push a "but we're the real monsters" theme that would have caused previous CoD characters to weep with shame.  There is no reverence for honorable heroes or pride of country to be found in MW2; there is only corruption, angst, and enough stoner references (Joint Ops, Blunt Trauma, pot leaf insignias, etc.) to make you groan.

The biggest problem with Modern Warfare 2's story is that it seems to have been written around a few gimmicky revelations and plot twists with absolutely no care for plausibility or continuity.  For example, in one amazing The Rock style prison shootout, you free a prisoner and start a cutscene where the prisoner's identity is revealed.  At first, it is a very exciting reveal, but shortly after the escape when you have time to think about the implications of the level, you begin to realize that it does not make much sense at all.  Similarly, the plot seems to be shoehorned into a frantic timeline of only a few days.  The timeline is totally unnecessary and unrealistic, to the point of absurdity.  You are part of an offensive with the Army in Afghanistan, then get placed deep undercover with terrorists by the CIA, and are part of a terrorist attack, causing Russia to invade Washington DC--all in less time than it took for the US to launch its attack in Afghanistan following 9/11?  I can be forgiving of these types of plot holes when watching an episode of 24, but when the timeline is entirely self-imposed, I am less tolerant.  It comes across as bad writing used to justify why you need to defend a hamburger stand, rather than to tell a cohesive story.  

What most frustrated me the most, though, is that the game manages to wreck a staple of the Call of Duty franchise--switching between concurrent stories with different protagonists.  Part of the problem is Infinity Ward's apparent urge to kill every character you ever control (or try to), but part of it comes down to awkward design choices.  For instance, at one point you control one character in Brazil and watch a character jump through a window and tackle a perp, but later in the game you control the guy who jumped out the window alongside the character you'd played earlier.  Why not have just controlled the same guy the whole game and either A) let me tackle the guy or B) swapped the character's places so I watched the first guy tackle the guy.  At the end of my first playthrough, the story was a muddled mess, largely because the story does nothing to help you keep track of which member of the team you are playing as.  I did not even realize that I played two different people in the same squad until I replayed the first mission and realized I was alongside the guy who I had played during the final mission.  Arrgh, it does not need to be this confusing!

While the story is absolutely horrific, the single player gameplay is rock solid for the most part.  The set pieces, such as the suburban firefights or the previously mentioned burger stand shootout, are incredibly fun and well paced.  They look spectacular and provide some exciting and challenging scenarios that are both unique and compelling.  Running from behind a Humvee to hide inside someone's suburban garage is fantastic fun.  New equipment such as heartbeat monitors, thermal vision and Predator drones with missiles mix things up and keep the action interesting.  Some new elements are less fun, though--I never want to play a snowmobile escape or boat chase scene again.  After the first MW game's stellar campaign, this campaign is just disappointing.  While the gameplay itself is soli, it is hard to get fully sucked into the action when there is a constant feeling of implausibility lingering over each set piece level.  While the actual shooting is fun, the storytelling is bad enough to actually be distracting and detract from the immersion.

This could be part of the reason that the new cooperative Spec Ops mode is so much fun.  It takes the incredible set pieces from the singleplayer game (and some from the first Modern Warfare) and gives you objectives to compete either alone or with a partner.  A few missions require two players, such as missions where one player will be on the ground completing objectives and another in a helicopter or a gunship firing down on the advancing enemies.  Without a doubt, Spec Ops is the highlight of the game, and could keep you busy for dozens of hours if you have a good co-op partner.  

There are a few gripes to be had with the co-op, but they are almost trivial in nature.  First, when playing splitscreen, the shrinks each player's screen area down, leaving a significant amount of screen real estate unused.  This could be a deal killer if you are planning on playing splitscreen on a smaller TV.  Second, the co-op is limited to two players.  This is quite disappointing, especially considering that Treyarch managed to put 4-player online co-op into Call of Duty: World at War which came out last year.  Spec Ops is still one of the best co-op game modes available; hopefully MW3 will see it perfected.

Recommendation

It comes down to this, Modern Warfare 2 is a far superior multiplayer game than its predecessor, but its singleplayer campaign is a giant step backwards.  Considering Modern is the most successful console multiplayer game in history, most people looking to buy MW2 will not be disappointed.  If however, you are looking for a quality singleplayer experience, this might not be what you are looking for, but the Spec Ops could be enough to make up for the campaign's failures.