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Ha and car producers are whining about loosing money to used cars market. Cry me a river.
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Trilarion: I agree with this. However, people get used to high quality. If you see average to poor graphics (even if you are a strategy fan and actually don't think that graphics is important to you) right after looking at the most graphically stunning game of the year, you get a bit dissappointed. Ten years before, your game would be a big hit, today, people would say its just another re-iteration of this mediocre idea with lousy graphics. So maybe its not so easy to cut costs, when the current standards are so high.

Probably... at this point maybe just don't increase graphical detail much, rather than go backwards. I guess the 360 still hanging in there is a sign they're doing this anyway.
Small teams with little budget do great looking games though, like Zeno Clash or Death to Spies 2.
Its my civic duty as an Australian citizen to do everything in my power to enjoy THQ games without paying them a cent (directly). When you insist on fucking your customers in the ass, its only fair they return the 'favour'.
THQ are heavyweight competitors in the game of regional pricing. Right up there with 2kGames and digital newcomer Electronic Arts. All fighting hard to lose my money.
http://www.steamprices.com/au/
Second hand sales are just an easy target for publishers to point at when they're under pressure from their investors.
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lukaszthegreat: THQ is wrong in their complaints. There is no doubt about it.
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Delixe: The trouble is the games industry are the only ones capable of doing something about it and so far they have been allowed to stomp all over consumers rights with EULA's that are barely legal.

I agree that EULAs suck bigtime, but I'm not sure they really have anything to do with the problem. Steam might include the inability to resell in their EULA but they don't have to, they can just not allow reselling. I think Terms of Service violations is usually what is used to ban accounts.
All this stupidity can exist even if EULAs were a stillborn idea that never gained traction.
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Trilarion: However, people get used to high quality. If you see average to poor graphics (even if you are a strategy fan and actually don't think that graphics is important to you) right after looking at the most graphically stunning game of the year, you get a bit dissappointed.

The thing is, though, that good graphics don't need to be expensive. High-detail, photorealistic graphics are expensive, but this is not the same as good graphics. Highly stylized graphics can be relatively inexpensive to implement (aside from the cost of hiring on people who actually have the proper artistic skills), and such graphics also tend to stand the test of time better than the expensive, cutting edge, shiny stuff. For example, the fairly recent King's Bounty remakes have graphics that I find quite enjoyable to look at, and I highly doubt the cost of implementing those graphics broke the bank for Katauri and 1C. HOMM3, Disciples 2, Psychonauts, and Beyond Good and Evil are also examples of games that didn't have cutting edge graphics even at the time of their release, but which still remain quite enjoyable to look at even to this day. The only trick is that to pull off good graphics at a lower budget actually requires artistic talent and insight, while many of the big development houses today just seem to approach the issue of graphics with "throw money at it until it looks shiny."
Agreed that graphics don't need to be cutting edge to look good. HOMM3 is still very visually pleasing to me, and so is Total Annihilation. I don't play either at anywhere near the top resolution my monitor and graphics card can muster, either. Titan's Quest still looks great to me too. For the six months Iet myself play WOW, when it first came out, I thought it looked great.
I rarely find the need for a lot of the things that graphics addicts groove on, like shadows, reflections, elaborate fractal water or clouds or whatever. If I turn them off, I don't tend to notice them missing, either. If anything, it's the style and color palette that attracts and satisfies me visually. That's more about talent and creative vision than about money.