Braben Suggests Tactics To Combat Pre-Owned Sales

Gaming God and creator of Elite, David Braben, has written a blog about the pre-owned market. David suggests six different strategies that may combat the pre-owned market.

  1. Continue with online passes and one time use codes with each release.
  2. Introduce industry-wide serial numbers on discs, giving developers the opportunity to lock a game to a console.
  3. Industry participation in pre-owned sales.
  4. Bring in ‘Not For Resale’ SKUs effectively killing the market dead.
  5. Make games a disc that costs £5 and works as a demo, if you want the full game pay a further fee online.
  6. Move to digital distribution.

David urges an industry wide response to the pre-owned market and said, “Whatever the tactic, let’s do something soon, and stop all the shouting about the unjust iceberg.”

The debate is bound to continue, retailers are unlikely to give up larger profit margins from pre-owned games. One comment from an independent games retailer on MCV is as follows.

There is little or no profit in new release games, the outlay to buy say 10 units of a new release game will be around £370, (£37.00 per unit) to sell back at £399.99. (£39.99 per unit). So for your original outlay you make a whopping £29.99.

If I buy pre-owned stock I normally double up my profits so for £370 I spend I would get back £740, be this on games or consoles. Do the maths & then explain to me why it’s better to make £29.99 rather than £370.

Should publishers get a cut of the pre-owned market? It’s worth noting that in the past few weeks the games industry has boasted that:

  • Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood has logged more pre-orders than any other game in the history of Ubisoft.
  • Medal Of Honor has sold over 1.5 million copies in five days.
  • Black Ops has more pre-orders than Modern Warfare 2 and looks like leapfrogging its older brother to become the biggest game of all time.
  • Playstation Move managed to sell 1.5 million hardware units in Europe alone.
  • Halo: Reach generated $200 million worth of sales on its first day.

Source: Develop / MCV

50 Comments

  1. Couldn’t they just make businesses that sell pre-owned games give a percentage back to the developer?

    Wouldn’t stop people from selling on Ebay and the like, but at least the robbing b**tards would get some money back that way?

    • Musicians get a small amount from the Performing Rights Society everytime their work is initially sold (whether on CD or digital) and then again when played on the radio or public address systems.
      I think the only fair solution would be for the industry to adopt something along these lines to profit further from their intelectual property.

  2. i have absolutely no doubt in my mind that if they do manage to kill off the preowned market it will do more harm to the industry than good, and they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves and their insatiable frakking greed.

    why does the games industry have to have special rights to profit from buyers selling their purchases?

    did any games cost as much to make as avatar? probably not, yet you don’t see cameron demanding a cut from anybody who sells their copy of his film, which they will once they bring out the non bare bones version.

    everywhere else people are having to tighten their belts, yet the gaming industry is thinking up ways of taking even more of our money.

    years from now we’ll look back at this time and see that this was the beginning of the end for gaming, when everything after this point will be lost because every single piece of content was tied to a single user and as such can no longer be experienced, could you imagine if any other media worked like that?
    if you could no longer read any of the classic novels because the original owners are long dead, or you could never watch any chaplin movies because nobody who saw them first time round is still alive?
    and what if nobody knew what the mona lisa looked like because only the original owner was able to view it?
    that kind of world would be a very sad place.

    if gaming wants to be seen as a legitimate media then this kind of thing should be unacceptable.

    • give this man/women a biscuit

      • woman, and jaffa cakes please. :)

  3. What would happen to people selling there games on Ebay ?.

  4. hmm interesting, interesting… Now go and make Elite 4!!!

  5. Sell games at a cheaper price and I’ll buy more of them. I know not everyone would – those that buy everything anyway – but I would.

  6. I would like to see point 3 where you could get some monetry bonus, or even an in game bonus selling back your game to the publishers. But to be honest I can’t see any of them having a beneficial impact on the retail of games.

  7. My local ASDA has started selling pre-owned games this week. They don’t have many titles but they have allocated a lot of shelving space for it so I’m guessing more stock is on the way.

  8. The last preowned game I bough was Just Cause 2, which I got for about £15, but then I went on to buy the dlc, which I wouldn’t have done if I’d spent 40 odd quid on it. The same goes for assasins creed 2 and red dead redemption. Just shows there are ways of making money from pre-owned sales that don’t involve killing off the market

    • they always forget that they get the chance to sell another set of dlc for that copy of the game when they say how preowned sales are stealing the bread from their children’s mouths, and never mention how many trade ins go towards new games.

  9. They are just after more money. They make a game and if it gets great scores people will buy it new. If it doesn’t get great reviews people will wait then pick it up second hand. Simple as that.

    I myself only buy Multiplayer stuff Brand new as thats what me and my mates play most so its a social thing as well. Though why we all bought the steaming pile of turd thats Medal of Honor I’ll never know?

  10. Any company exec considering any option other than number 3, which can be quickly implemented through the licensed reseller route, needs their head checking. If I want to sell / give away a game I own privately, then that’s my prerogative – if I sell it to a retailer who then sells it as used (especially at near full price, when the new copies have been taken off the shelves to force you to buy used *cough*HMV*cough*), then a percentage of their profit should go to the developers.

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