GameStop Wants To Sell Secondhand Digital Download Video Games 123
MojoKid writes "GameStop makes a killing selling used videogames, but what happens to that business model when digital distribution platforms run physical media out of town? That's not anything to worry about today, tomorrow, next week, or even next year, but at some point, GameStop will have to deal with the direction the games industry is headed, and it may already have a solution. GameStop CEO Paul Raines recently brought up the possibility of reselling used digital downloads."
Re:Good Luck (Score:4, Interesting)
If I were going to attempt this I wouldn't be selling used games, but whole accounts. For example you have a steam account with games x,y, and z and a steam account with just game x. I would pay you more for account 1 than account 2. There's already market places setup for things like wow accounts. A quick google search pulled up something called armorybids. Yeah, it's against their ToS, but it's not illegal yet.
Re:Interesting, but it wont help Gamestop (Score:2, Interesting)
On countries where there theres the right to resell and the right to reverse engenieer to get compatibility, they could do something like Garena + hacking the executables to make them work without steam. Provided that each game sold is backed by a license, it would be legal in my country.
Re:Good Luck (Score:5, Interesting)
eBay items will evaporate as will the low prices.
Except that's not how it's worked in practice. If you look at Steam all the old titles are still available and for cheap. Brand new and fully patched and cheaper than they sell for used at GameStop. When every player represents a sale and inventory space is unlimited there is a huge incentive for continued support and aggressive price drops.
Last week on the big Steam summer sale I picked up copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum for $4 and KoTOR (I lost my discs years ago and have been wanting another play-through) for $2. The system works. And works far better for every level from the developers to the consumers. The only people is does not serve better are parasitic rent seekers like GameStop.
Re:Good Luck (Score:4, Interesting)
Not saying it helps overall, but in a few rare cases it does work out better for us.
Re:Good Luck (Score:2, Interesting)
How on earth are GameStop "parasitic rent seekers"? They buy used games, that people don't want any more, and sell them to other people for a markup. Or to put it another way, they match up people who want to sell games with people who want to buy games, in exchange for a commission. That's a useful service, not parasitism. And interaction with them is purely voluntary - you always have the option of buying the game new - so they're not seeking rent on existing transactions.
You can argue that their markup is too high for the service they provide, and there's some validity to that. But there's nothing stopping anything else from entering the used-games market and undercutting them if they can - and the fact that no one else really does indicates that they're charging a fair price for their services.
The real oddity is that they're competing in a market where the marginal cost of new product is close to zero (say, 10c per downloaded game to run the file server). There's nothing stopping the game publishers from selling their games so low that GameStop can't possible complete, as in the examples you gave. But that cuts into their profits - they maximise their profits when they set a somewhat higher price. In fact, if it weren't for the need to compete with second-hand games from GameStop, the price of new games would probably be significantly higher.
Re:Can't stop reselling in the EU (Score:4, Interesting)
Tell that to the lawyers; most politicians are lawyers. They love to create issues out of nothing, it boosts their business.
Sometimes I wonder if politicians are trying to be programmers and make Judges into computers; except they have zero software engineering skills and their profession (and their own law firms they have a vested interest in) greatly benefits from "bugs" in their legal code.