Tag Archives: used game sales

GameStop has said consumers’ “desire to purchase” consoles will be “significantly diminished” if manufacturer were to block the ability to play used games.

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Retailers in the UK have seen a significant increase in used game sales and trade-ins since GAME closed up 277 of its shops.

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Defying industry trends, a new online retailer is planning to return ten percent of all used game sales to publishers.

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Richard Browne, former Eidos developer and former VP of Core Studios at THQ and Universal Interactive, believes “the real cost” of used games is not to the publisher, but to the consumer  as well as the direct cause of the “death of single-player gaming.”

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Silicon Knights boss Denis Dyack believes the surge in games with a large multiplayer component is due to developers and publishers trying to combat used game sales.

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Lionhead has is of the opinion that second-hand sales are more of problem today with Xbox 360, than PC piracy.

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GameStop has reported $3.02 billion in holiday sales for the nine week period ending on January 1.

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Consumer group Which? has found some retailers which accept used games pay less than 30 percent of the game’s total retail worth.

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Take-Two CEO Ben Feder told attendees at the G7 Think Equity conference last week the used game market is “interesting” and something developers should take part in.

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THQ’s to start fighting used games sales by introducing one-time use codes with its new releases, and UFC Undisputed 2010 is just the first out of the gate.

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Analyst group Cowen and Company suggests in a new report that “online pass” from EA may be a way for the industry to curtail used game sales.

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7-Eleven has announced that it’s to start selling used games at over 3,000 of its US stores for $19.99 and below.

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Valve’s Doug Lombardi has told Destructoid that the best way to combat used game sales and piracy, is to make good games and offer continued support.

“We always see these overall numbers, like how much money GameStop’s making per year off of used game sales, but we really don’t have a breakdown of details for those,” he told the site. “I don’t personally know, after being at Valve since Half-Life 1, how many copies of our games per year are sold used, and on the PC versus the 360, so I think there’s a certain amount of information that’s missing, sort of like piracy. I think a lot of folks cry piracy when a game fails to hit their forecast and it may or may not be part of the problem, and it may or may not be all of the problem, but I think to throw any one reason at any problem is probably a mistake, considering the lack of information on both fronts.

“Having said all that, though, I think that it’s probably true to say that gamers tend to have affinity for the games that they like, so if you’re doing your job and making a good game, and providing a high level of service for that game at the time of release and post-release, I’m guessing you’re probably less of a victim of piracy and trade, because people want to have the full copy, the legal copy, and have all the updates.

“I think there are ways of curbing both piracy and used game sales by providing a higher level of service at the time of launch and post-launch. And I think what we’re seeing, as platforms become more and more connected, that this problem will become less and less an issue as the idea of offering a service post-launch becomes more and more en vogue.”

More through the link.

Crackdown may have been a huge hit with gamers, but apparently the game only broke even money-wise for the developers and Microsoft.

“With Crackdown we sold about 1.5 million copies, but even at that we pretty much only managed to break even,” Dave Jones told Gamasutra. “It was due to the amount of factors that were out of our control as the developer, influences such as GameStop’s amazing used-game sales.

“We know 1.5 million new copies were sold, but it’s likely there were 2.5 – 3 million sold when you include used.”

Wow. Sorry ’bout that.

Via IndustryGamers.

Dallas-based attorney Mark Methenitis has told Law of the Game that GameStop’s policy of selling opened games as new may be “deceptive”.

Kotaku claimed yesterday that Gamestop was taking discs from new games before putting them on shelves – presumably to prevent theft – but that staff were allowed to take them home to play.

Dodgy? Methenitis thinks so.

“From a legal standpoint, ignoring any pragmatic analysis, it certainly seems that way from the letter of the law. Certainly, it’s something the FTC could investigate, but more practically, it may be a matter for state deceptive trade practices law,” he wrote.

“In Texas, for example, it is a deceptive trade practice if you are ‘representing that goods are original or new if they are deteriorated, reconditioned, reclaimed, used, or secondhand.’”

Methenitis said that GameStop is not “as nefarious as many people seem to think it is” but in theory it is deceptive.

You can read the full back and forth on all of this through the links.

Lazard analyst Colin Sebastian has said that the used game market could provide $2 billion in sales for GameStop this year.

Sebastian added that Gamestop’s used game sales were unlikely to be badly affected by Amazon’s intentions on the space.

“While Amazon’s recent entry into the trade-in market remains an overhang on shares, we believe there will be limited impact on GameStop’s business,” he said.

“In contrast, Amazon’s offering is likely to have more appeal to ‘non-core gamers,’ or those consumers more likely to trade games in exchange for Amazon.com credit toward purchases in any product category.”

More on Gama.