I fail to see the difference between this and second hand DVDs, CDs etc.

Maybe if the retail price for a game want £40-50 and more like £20 there wouldnt be a market for secondhand games.

And of course theres the fact that the retailer makes the biggest chunk of profit from selling the game anyway....

Another tantrum by a industry 'leader', wanting to be able to control want the customer is able to do with something they've purchased, and no longer want. Would prices drop if his utopia came into existence? I doubt it very much.

Lets look at this another way. A specialist Games retailer gets all his income from selling games / consoles. When a new game comes out, he puts the game on his shelves at the suggested price. His sales are less than they should be because, although through the nature of his business, he has been promoting games/ consoles, the supermarket down the road has done a deal and can sell the game way cheaper. The supermarket has done no promoting, but gains the sale due to the price. What should the specialist do? Go and work for Tesco shelf stacking or make up the difference selling second hand? Before studios complain, they should 'get real'. This industry would be a much worse place without these specialists.

This is a opinion o***ames buyer, not a retailer.

To take these arguments to their logical conclusion, this would mean that Barrat Homes could claim a percentage of the resale value of every house they build, every time one is sold, in perpetuity. This argument has also been tried in the Art world, with some artists claiming they have a moral right to a share of any of the profits of their artwork that is resold, but the same analogy exists - if you apply it to one industry where there is a specific good created, then you need to equally apply it to all: second hand CDs, second hand books, furniture, cars, electrical goods and so on.

And how about shares in a company? There appears to be a thriving market for these...

I think they're upset because Microsoft get away with it already. As is happening with an increasing number of new PC releases (i.e. internet registration) :(

The publishers could simply change the software licence to disallow resale. So, why don't they?

This difference between games and the dvd and cd market, is that films and music have other ways of making money. Films make money from tv, cinema, etc, music makes money from merchandise, licencing, gigs, etc.. Games generally only have a few weeks at retail in which to make all their money, and to have so much of the money diverted away from the developers seems really unfair to me.

To me it's not so much that retailers sell used games, it's the emphasis they place on used titles.

It's not unusual to walk into a 'specialist' store and see the new games tucked away in the corner while the used games are given pride of place, with virtually nothing to identify them as used.

Used copies of a title are available almost immediately and I regularly see assistants converting sales of a new title to a sale of the equivalent used title. At the midnight launch of one of the big titles the only thing any of the assistants said to me during the night was "You can trade those games in next week if you want to."

Even the customers are being ripped off, the price of a used game is usually very close to retail and the game trade in rates are very low.

The specialist chains are generating more and more profit from used games and aren't going to change, but it's going to backfire. It won't be long before the developers and publishers wise up and go direct.

I'm going to have to agree with the first comments on here and say that developers/publishers have no leg to stand on. They made a product. The product was published. The product was sold. The product was bought. The product is owned.

What the owner (who paid money for it) does, isn't up to them or anyone else involved. It is up to the owner.

If it's s ****e game (and let's face it, most tend to be, even Free Radical's and Frontier Dev's efforts) then the owner might flu**** down the toilet. If it's good, he might keep playing it. If he completes it then they might give it to a friend. If they like another game, then they might trade it in at a games shop. It's their product. They bought it with their own money and they can do whatever they want with it.

So what are the developers/publishers gonna do? Go round all the school yards up and down the country and demand that school kids don't trade/sell/swap their games with each other?!

Pathetic...If you can't stand the market heat...get out of the development kitchen!

The publishers could simply change the software licence to disallow resale. So, why don't they?

The only reason why specialists sell preowned games is the same reason the developers make the games...profit. As long as games are expensive then people will always want to swap them for newer ones. Maybe if Steve Ellis and David Braben didn't get paid so much the developer wouldn't need to make so much money back in the first place and the games would be cheaper, but that's never going to happen. With the likes of Asda and Tesco's selling games at a total loss then where else is the retailer going to get their money from?

Get rid of Preowned and watch game sales fall. Who will buy crudy games if they are not at preowned prices?

Preowned has kept consoles alive at times of poor game standards... and preowned has kept indies alive in times of poor game margins..

I know publishers would like more money, but then produce good games that people actually want to buy and keep.

http:www.venturetothetop.com

It's called a free market which made you all rich in the first place so live with it

Go Digital Distribution or raise game prices.

One solution is to do like the MMO market does, encode every "game" with a "key" and lock it to a single user and/or account BEFORE it will be activated. In order to play said game you would HAVE to agree with the EULA.

if there was no preowned games there would be a decrease in games sales, games wouldnt get sold on mass only the games that get good ratings in a magazine would sell as gamers wont buy any new game because of the cost involved. and the games that get bad reviews probably wont get sold at all cutting off a lot of developers.

Heres the real deal:
To illustrate, I'm going to use an imaginary PS3 title we will call... say... CyborgNinja, made by our fake team called Ninjabotics.
Now, Ninjabotics is taking a risk with this new series CyborgNinja and have some big ideas for it, they amass a team of first class talent to bring these ideas to life.
Soon Ninjabotics are getting so excited about these great ideas they are seeing that they decide to invest more money in the game to hire more people to create tonnes more interactive environments and gameplay mechanics, but then they get more ambitious, take a page out of Motorstorm's book, and hire a helicoptor to film part of the amazon so they can recreate it in the game. They don't stop there, they also hire actors and rig them up with censors to literally act out a small movie to be presented throughout the game.
This costs Ninjabotics a tonne of cash upfront to do, but the way they see it, this game is a revolution and gamers will eat it up.

CyborgNinja hits the shelves and the reviews are all outstanding for this one, copies fly off the shelves, it looks like the investment Ninjabotics put into this revolutionary game are actually going to pay off... sweet!

But 1 week goes by... Since alot of gamers out there can't afford a new game every week, they trade in the last title they bought asap in order to get the best trade in value towards another game.
Well Jeff buys CyborgNinja and beats the game once over the course of the week, after which he tells all of his friends to go buy CyborgNinja because it was that great, and he trades in his copy for the next new game on his list...

Problem.. All these friends who hear the game is good, now go out to buy a copy, but, since most of the copies sold during launch are now traded in, everyone buying the used games is paying say 49.99 instead of 59.99 on average.
There are more than enough of these used copies to go around, and even if they come straight back on a 2nd trade in, if the game is still popular, the store resells it for 49.99 again right off the bat.

SO whats wrong here? nobody was buying any more new copies of the game, because the used ones were being resold by a 3rd party over and over again, sometimes one came that cost 59.99 to buy from the developer, who roughly has to spend say 25.00 to make the disk, after this stores are making more money through used sales than the developer is selling the games new, and doesnt give the developer one red cent for this revenue.

If you all want to see games take off and our games really go next gen, stop turning a blind eye to stores ripping off the creators of all our favourite games.

The stores should have to give the manuf. a portion of every used game they resell, no question in my mind.

Although, i ushually buy games new for the specific purpose of supporting the companies taht make good games, there is no reason that someone who sells somthing should be able dictate what the owner does with their property.
Theres also a good reason why their are used games for sale... because alot of them suck and/or dont offer enough entertainment to have any longevity. So it is a developers fault if a customer wants to return a game because they don't see enough value in it to constitute keeping it. People returng games is also a stimulus to the market, because there is the possibility that they will buy new merchendise with the money they get on the return.
The only market i can think of where the company has a say in resale is the PC market. Every other market involves the person who is the owner of the property deciding what they want to do with it seeing as it is theirs and thats the way it should be for games.

All the standard "does piracy harm the victim" tests also show the exact same harm from resale. And yet the industry associations see nothing wrong with used sales. The only counter to this that developers have is the dreaded subscription model!

I do NOT my recently released games used. period. I buy games that are a few years old used. The developers shuld get their cut.

The ar tanalogy falls flat on it's face, because art is generally sold at a very high price, and the artist makes their profit off the initial sale of the one of a kind piece of art. If the art is made to demand, it's rarely resold, except as old knick knacks at garage sales.

I can go to a local used game store. they have a "beat it in a week" guarantee,where if you buy a new game, and bring it for store credit within a week, they will credit the FULL USED RESALE VALUE to you. Now is this kosher? NO. The new games that are good quickly get bought, copied (or actually beat) and return, and move to the used shelf, where they sell many more times, because as used, they are beating the retail for the new at the supermarket,and because though the game is like new, and selling for almost as much as new, it's used, you can't take advantage of beat it in a week. I could abuse the heck out of beat it in a week. If i put my mind to it, I could beat most games in a week, and return them. I'm not the only one who can beat nearly every game in a week. but i don't. I go there to buy second hand games for obsolete systems. games where the publisher has already made their money. NES. SNES. much older PS2 games.

i hav no problems with dev going direct but if they do every one would hav to put out demos cause i wont buy a game that i cant trade in if it sucks so there should b a demo for every game made or no games should suck for now on

Maybe if they dropped the price of the darn things to $30 more people would by them at launch and not have to wait until they're 2nd hand.

Really you only save like 3-5 dollars. I wouldn't mind buying used games if there really was a big difference in price, but really I just buy new games now because it is basically the same price. Actually Ebay is the best place by buy used games.

Braben has clearly never worked in video games retail because if he had he would know that he's talking complete rubbish. I've worked in games retail for the last several years, and while pre-owned is very profitable for retailers, its a fact that on a weekly basis more new games are sold than pre-owned, especially around the Christmas period. This week alone our precentage of new sales was double that of pre-owned.

Fact is Braben is pissed of that his company can't charge what they damn well like for their games because of the pre-owned market. You can gurantee that we'd be paying anywhere between £60 to £80 a product if it weren't for the pre-owned market forcing these greedy *******s to lower their prices.

Long live the pre-owned market.

So, should Ford garner some of the profit from ever second hand Ford vehicle sold, Mr Braben? No, don't be so stupid.

Belt up and quit grizzling Braben, you're talking out your behind.

c'est de la grande et majestueuse bouffonnerie!

the guy have to think before writting such a **** theory.
what if for the same reasons cars, houses, computers, [insert here other commercial stuffs] shouldn't be bought in the second-hand market?
pffff c'est du grand nawak, faut arrêter de fumer la moquette

Car manufacturers only get paid once too - when they sell a new car. Yet the car gets sold over and over in a used condition. So why should game makers get a special privilege that no other producer of goods and services gets?

Obviously many people are not aware of what video games are. They are "Intellectual Properties", just like music and movies, you don't own theses ideas, only the physical media they are stored on. THAT is the difference between, planes, trains, and automobiles. When you view, listen, and play theses forms of media, you agree to their terms o***reement.
They have every rightto protect theses ideas.

Obviously many people are not aware of what video games are. They are "Intellectual Properties", just like music and movies, you don't own theses ideas, only the physical media they are stored on. THAT is the difference between, planes, trains, and automobiles. When you view, listen, and play theses forms of media, you agree to their terms o***reement.
They have every right to protect theses ideas.

(sorry for the double post spam, there was no edit option.)

However, books are also intellectual properties, you only own the media they are on...and for as long as there have been books people have traded in them. The fact is that the special privileged status that IP gets actually does harm to the market in general. Take for example, music...there are songs written over 150 years ago that are STILL in copyright. The existence of IP is meant to help stimulate innovation and creation, but any sytem that grants rights to money in perpetuity does not promote that creativity, they promote the notion of living off past accomplishments rather than making new ones.

The argument could actually be made that in the interests of recycling and preserving finite physical resources there is more of a case for perpetual rights in terms of physical goods rather than theoretically infinite intellectual resources...