Martin Tremblay, allow me to be the first to bring your attention to the reality of the pre-owned market.

-pre-owned games drive the sales of new titles. Fact.

No? You disagree?

Well myself and pretty much everyone I know who games, (from all ages and gaming backgrounds), rely on the the pre-owned market to purchase new releases; without it we would be buying a hell of a lot less new games.

But go ahead, support the removal of the pre-owned market and say bye bye to a huge chunk of your profits in the process because you know as well as I do that should the pre-owned become a thing of the past publishers won't suddenly drop the price of all their titles because you're all a bunch of greedy bar-stewards.

Yeah. *His* side of the industry...

They don't gain any profit from pre-owned games, which is one of the reasons why recently there has been an increase in titles only being able to be installed so many times or being tied to the hardware of the machine it was first installed on.

Its just the publishers wanting their cut twice.

This is just plain and simple greed. How dare they suggest that we cant buy second hand games, and can only purchase new ones !!! Lets apply that pathetic logic to any other industry. Second hand cars anyone ????? Nopes, lets just buy newones, as obviously we are all rich ! GREED GREED GREED.........

@3: That's why I refuse to buy games on the PC any more. I will not be dictated to with regards to how and when I play games. I'm a games developer and I strongly believe that the most important people are those we make the games for, i.e. the gamers. Not the fat-cat, lazy-asses who just want to finance the fancy lifestyle.

I recently bought Spectrasonics Omnisphere, it cost around £300 and uses an activation system. The difference is, I can use it on multiple PC's, plus I have unlimited activations. That's the difference between a company who has respect for it's customers, and ones that show total and utter contempt for them.

It's interesting that the opposition to Mr. Tremblay's points feels that used game sales actually fuel new game sales, rather than adressing the real issue. While MH had the argument correct until adding the word "twice" at the end, the truth is retailers get their cut multiple times on used games. Creators and publishers (those who fund the game and distribute it) do not. Is this publisher and developer greed, or is it a case where everyone needs to share the revenue.

Is it greedy for a band to want to be compensated for writing and creating a song? If you say yes, think about what you do for work and imagine if people didn't feel you deserved to be paid for it when they used your work product. Add to that the fact that there was someone profiting multiple times on what you created after the content was used in the manner intended. It starts to sound like piracy, only retail is the pirate here, not the end user or consumer.

Think about seeing a film in a movie theater, because playing through a game is interacting with contact for the first time (if we had a secondary market like DVD or broadcast royalties, or internet distribution rights, resale wouldn't be a problem, because in film, the creator and distributor participate in the revenue).

Getting back on point, you can't leave a movie theater in the middle of the film or after you've seen the film, and get a trade in for a new movie. The content is the experience and the value you get from entertainment (it's not like a durable good, like a car).

i'm all for things being less expensive, but you're pointing at the wrong villain. Retail is the reason things cost what they do, not publishers and developers wanting to participate in the revenue derived from their work and investment risk.

And if a game doesn't sell at retail...they send it back and the publisher pays the shipping.

I agree, but I think you mean "content", not "contact"

i can tell you mate if a game doesnt sell we dont just send it back.
no such thing as sale or return in this industry and we dont get any postage paid either.
we only get free shipping when we buy over a certain limit, we are lucky to make £3 out of a new release and if it doesnt sell or gets priced drop we lose out.

dont forget as well that most indies are laying down real money to buy stock, its not just credit accounts. if this stuff doesnt sell we lose out A LOT ! check you facts before making statements
as for pre owned games the indies need preowned to make aliving,

"If you say yes, think about what you do for work and imagine if people didn't feel you deserved to be paid for it when they used your work product."

I get paid once - I am a technical author, I create product documentation and I get salaried, I don't get paid more when more people read my work. I document issues and bugs, I produce training videos, how-to guides, podcasts and other creative materials. I get paid a salary, I don't get paid per view.

My Father installs driveways - he doesn't get paid per vehicle or person that uses them. What is the difference between that and a game? He designs, builds and sells the final product, if someone rips up the drive way and reuses it should he get paid again?

This concept of being paid for work every time someone uses it , as opposed to every time a new item of it is sold is unique to the creative industries.

Games publishers just want to be able to sell the same thing time and again as they fail miserably to sell new games.

Tell me, should the duplicator who pressed the discs get a cut of the resale as well? Or just the devs or the publishers? any product reaching the market uses the skills of may team all as important as each other. Should they all get a piece? why not?

Once you create boxed product then that's it, the public see's it no differently to anything else that's a physical product, the only people who see otherwise are those that produce it and feel they should be paid each time it's used.

"The content is the experience and the value you get from entertainment (it's not like a durable good, like a car)."

Sorry, you've lost me there - last time I bought a game it was £40 and I walked out with a disc in a box, boxed product, last time I went to see a film at the cinema it cost me £6.50 to sit in a plush cinema - they are not the same, a better comparison would be to compare buying a DVD - boxed product £20 pounds or so, you own the item at the end of the day. and don't give me that cobblers that used films aren't sold in much the same way as games, there's 2-3 used dvd (and Cd) shops in every town, blockbuster and all the other rental shops sell their ex-rental DVD's alongside their new product.

We've blamed piracy, used, grey imports for the industries ills, what next when the problem is bad product management and a lack of inginuety in game writing - thats why games don't sell not used.

Declaration of interest: I work for a games publisher.

Like all other sellers, Mr Tremblay, or Mr Jolly Snr, should be free to set his price, terms and conditions (e.g. thou shalt not sell this on), and if the potential buyer is free to walk away if he does not like the deal.

It is a reality of the market that retailers which are more important to a publisher in a financial sense are in a position to make better deals than other retailers.

I believe SeanK made an insightful point about retailers selling the same product multiple times - on used, some retailers enjoy over double the margin they have on new. It's pretty obvious why publishers would want a piece of the action or stop it altogether. That is not to say there is any possibility of that happening in the foreseeable. I just don't understand why people get so angry (although, as someone so eloquently put it, opinion + internet = twat).

And of course publishers are looking at distributing for themselves and selling direct to the consumer.

(posting in parts because the MCV comment validator thinks I'm trying to include URLs. There is nothing like an URL in my comment.)

The cost per hour of entertainment from a game is comparable to the cost per hour of entertainment in a cinema, from a newly released DVD, from an hour of MP3s, or on a five-a-side football pitch, etc. But I don't see so much anger about the cost of those other forms of entertainment. Of course the consumer does not tend to think, "entertainment costs about 4 quid an hour, this game is said by reviewers to provide 20 hours gameplay, it's priced at 40 quid, that's about 2 quid an hour, so this seems a relatively good deal". It might help if he did! What he thinks is, "blimey, 40 quid is a lot of money".

And you can immediately see the attraction of DLC there, because you can offer a product at a more immediately attractive price ($10 for Fallout 3 DLC?) and something that is immediately comparable to the costs of other entertainment. Although, someone I know claimed he would never buy a game with the promise of DLC because if he bought a game the DLC should already have been in it - and I notice other people have said that DLC is clearly content cut from the original game so it can be sold as DLC. Jebus!

I think people do perceive 'digital' product differently to physical product; I think they perceive it to have inherently less value because it is not physical. That's my opinion, I have no data to back it up. But consider it.

Digital product also has less value because of an awareness that it can be freely pirated, in other words I can get this for free so why should I pay X quid (music is in a similar position - the published results of the Radiohead experiment are interesting), and because the vast majority of people are ignorant of what it costs to make a game and put it on the shelf.

Nothing wrong with ignorance until you start getting upset because of it.

I think that the earlier and more frequent reductions in price help to fuel this perception. So too does the apparent inability of some people to distinguish between new and old games. A commenter on the recent Trine 'controversy' was pretty silly about this, asking why the hell Trine was priced at X quid when this bundle of (old) games was priced at X quid - surely Trine should be half X quid. Again, Jebus.

And despite what some people seem to think, there is no entitlement to games and there is no entitlement to be a games retailer. That said, I have rather more sympathy for people who want to make an honest living and are struggling (indie retailers) than for the idiots who whine and rant about how Mr Burns of Whatever Publisher Inc. is ripping off gamers and swimming in money, and they have every right to pirate his games if they don't like his pricing.

For heaven's sake, we even had henry ford of this parish claim in another thread that "kids need the pre-owned market".

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