Getting Gamers by Jamie Madigan

Author:Jamie Madigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

Artificial Scarcity and Psychological Reactance

Sales aren’t usually perpetual. That’s pretty much right there in the definition of “sale,” if you look it up. Bargains are often only “while supplies last,” and the research is pretty clear that “available for a limited time” is a super-effective sales pitch because we value things more that are rare or otherwise have limited availability. For example, Bandai’s 1987 game Stadium Events is one of the most sought-after games for collectors of the Nintendo Entertainment System. In 2010, a woman sold a copy of the game on eBay for $13,105, essentially by accident. She had included it with a box of Nintendo games that she had found in her garage and had no idea why the bidding had gone so high when she checked on her new listing the next morning. Why was Stadium Events so valuable? Right around the time of its release, Nintendo pulled all copies of the game and destroyed them so that they could promote a different track-and-field game instead. But a few copies of Stadium Events managed to escape into the wild, making it one of the rarest game cartridges in existence. For that reason alone it is worth so much to collectors. It’s certainly not because it’s a great game.

This mentality isn’t limited to obsessive collectors, though. Valuing something because it’s rare is just one of those decision-making shortcuts that sticks with us because it offers such a good tradeoff between accuracy and mental effort over a lifetime. Psychologist Stephen Worchel and his colleagues illustrated this with a study involving cookies, but not those that websites deal in.[6] The researchers told subjects that they were participating in an experiment measuring people’s preferences for various consumer items. At a certain point in the spiel, the experimenter jabbed at a secret button under the desk. Psychologists love secret buttons, but instead of opening a trap door underneath the subject as usual, this one summoned a second experimenter bearing a jar of cookies. Depending on the experimental condition to which the subject had been assigned, this second experimenter delivered either a jar full of 10 cookies or an almost empty jar with just 2 cookies. Subjects were then asked to retrieve a cookie from the jar, take a bite, and then share their thoughts on taste, attractiveness, and what the cookies should be priced at. Relative to those who picked a treat from the mostly full jar, people drawing from a jar with only two cookies found them more delicious, more desirable, and worthy of a higher price. This happened despite the fact that the contents of both jars were exactly the same and came from a larger stash of just one brand of supermarket cookies. The perceived rarity of the cookies was influencing not only their perceived value but also their taste and appeal.

GOG.com uses this scarcity phenomenon to good effect during their semiregular Insomnia Sales. During these events, the digital storefront displays one game at a time with deep discounts. You might be able to get 80 percent off the classic game System Shock 2, for example.

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