October 31st, 2008

Against Pre Owned Games

For some people, pre owned games are a good alternative to piracy. Obviously, I am talking about gamers on a tight budget, but there's also another kind of customer into such things - the collector looking for releases that you can't get you hands on otherwise. Anyway, the problem is not with the consumer, but with the way shops are selling pre owned games, and the reaction of people from the gaming industry to this.

Speaking for Eurogamer.net at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, Frontier founder and creator of Elite, David Braben, said that "The shops are not giving us a way of distinguishing between pre-owned and new. So the shops are essentially defrauding the industry," when talking about HMV's move into selling pre-owned games.

Well, I think this is not shocking, it's just a move to give the market what it wants. If I, as a buyer, and an additional few thousands,

would like one day to buy pre owned games from our favorite shop, should that shop leave us go to eBay, or try and do our bidding?

The bad part of the story is that we're getting to that digital distribution part that I really hate only to think about - "We've got a lot of retailers eating our lunch and refusing to sell full-priced games. I've been in a shop where I've tried to buy a copy of a relatively recent game, and I've taken an empty box off the shelf and they've given me a pre-owned copy. That, I think, is disgraceful. Not holding stock of new games, substituting them with pre-owned games at the same or much the same price... That is really destroying the shelf-life of our games."

OK, pre owned games for about the same price of the new ones doesn't sound good at all, but for half the price, that would really be a smart move. Just one more thing - if you're a game producer, this should be a challenge - don't say anything against those selling pre owned games, but offer players something to make them keep those games in the collection, and not throw them away!