The Pre-Owned games market has always been huge because gamers as a general rule don't like to pay full price for a game unless they want it desperately, or if it's a special edition of some sort, which is why cheaper games are a welcome alternative.
However, I'm sure most of you probably know that there is a large possibility the next gen consoles (Xbox720, PS4) will be cutting out this booming market almost completely, by making online play require a code to activate (if you don't understand what that means, basically only the console the code is used on will be able to play that particular copy of the game online, taking a whole lot of fun out of the game, and if they'd done that with Aliens: Colonial Marines then buying that pre-owned would be worse than buying the pre-owned contents of my toilet), and the reason for this: Petty greed.
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| When this sight finally becomes pointless because of this, it will truly spell the end for our games retailers on the high-street |
The games market works like this, when a brand new game is sold, the companies that made the game take a percentage as commission and the rest goes to the retailer, however, when a pre-owned game is sold the retailers take all the money from it which, although great for our local high street GAME stores, can in all fairness be pretty damaging for the industry.
The thing I'm pointing out here is that the underline problem with the games industry all comes back to pricing I mean, look at it this way, when the DS came out most games would retail at £30, Xbox and PS3 bring it up to £40, and now the WiiU's here we see them retailing at £50 and God forbid if I'm ever going to buy a game for that price, even consoles are just stretching further and further out of our comfort range, when the 3DS came out it cost over and around the £200 mark, but sales were so bad they had to drop the price by a substantial £80 just to get those sales back, and look at the WiiU again, £350 is an awful lot for a wii with an iPhone (face it the cheaper one is so light on storage space it's like buying that horrible new
12GB PS3).
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| Sure it looks good, but with the current lineup of games it's definitely not worth £350 |
All I'm saying is that nobody would be complaining about the pre-owned games industry taking a huge hit like this if games were just cheaper to buy anyway, face it, they're only disks and cartridges with different bits of data on them, how can they cost so much?
The point I'm trying to make, although I haven't spelt it out clearly, is that in the modern economy a lot of people can't afford games and consoles at that price, which is why we need the Pre-owned market and the like.
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| Same console, same boxes, same disks, different covers, different prices... WTF? |