Braben: pre-owned is "damaging" market Comments by Robert Purchese

I praise second hand market because is the only way to get some old games without resorting ebay.

"True, but shops only have pre-owned section next to the brand-new section for one of things you mention (games) and may decide to stop getting new stock in if there's enough pre-owned stock there. Pre-owned is not like second-hand."

I disagree, I've been in many relevant shops that stock new and 2nd hand of most ents platforms from books to DVD. Lets not forget the monster that is Ebay where anything can be bought used.

So how is "pre-owned" not exactly the the same as 2nd hand? you are still buying a product someone else has owned rather than new. You may not like a store making money off buying goods and reselling at a profit but it's still just selling/buying 2nd hand (or 3rd,4th etc) goods.

The problem is the scale when compared to the size of the game market and the relatively short amount of time that games have to sell (usually the just a few months). With pre-owned you walk into the shop and if it's not in the new section it's in the pre-owned section, you don't make any special journey to find it. eBay, the local paper, etc... require more work.

How will devs get around this if shops don't want to share the proceeds of pre-owned sales? Assume the game is going to be pirated (like in South Korea), sell games so cheap so people will want to buy them instead of some less-than-perfect pre-owned copy (therefore removing the incentive for the shop to run a pre-owned section), make money off the DLC which can't be pirated, and load up the computer with spyware to make sure you're not using pirated DLC?

So shops will end up looking at a very different profit margin and unfortunately it'll also screw the second-hand market. It really is in both the shops' and their customers' interests that shops share the profits from pre-owned.

@ Dan234

But why do games have short shelf life? It's not because people don't want these games. They have a short life time at 40 quid a pop but that should be a warning to everyone involved that 40 quid is too much theses days for games.

I constantly buy older games as the 2nd hand price becomes reasonable for an impulse buy (i have to wait much longer sometimes for retail price to drop that far). I also hunt down REALLY old games thank to EBAY.

The is a long life for games it's just the way retail works it sees very little of that life and the publisher/dev see even less.

@everyone

I'd like to thank the lot of you for participating in this debate in the way you did. Most of you argued in a thoughtful, well-spoken and civil manner, it has truly been a pleasure. Discussions like these are rare, but certainly the reason why I come here. Well done!

@ karstux

Indeed, good discussion on an interesting subject that I think may be discussed more and more in the near future.....

@bad09: I'd imagine prices are set so high partly in an effort to recoup money lost though pre-owned sales.

Perhaps the price point could be set at 20, but it would probably be financial suicide if there's no agreement with shops in place about compensating the developers with a percentage of money made by the shop from pre-owned sales, unless it's something like Brain Training which sells over a long period of time.

@ Dan234

I do understand and in all honesty I don't claim to know anything other than I've bought and played games for over twenty years. But I can't help but feel in my bones if games were cheaper (in Blu/DVD territory) sales would increase ten fold and many would not bother to hunt down that 2nd hand cheap copy of some game they are slightly interested in. Or indeed only buy their favourite game series or sure fire hype machines.

Of course we ALL pay money for the games we want but the rest falls by the way side a lot of the time and the biggest obstacle for those games is price.

So crap game that takes 5 to 10 hours to complete with no replay value and its the consumers fault for wanting to save money.

Braben you have lost any credibility you ever had in my opinion.

I gave up on waiting for the next Elite game when you started producing tycoon games, it became obvious that money is all that you want in the easiest way possible.