Is Buying a Pre-owned Game Wrong?

If your the same as millions of other gamers in the world, you’ve probably bought a second hand game at a cheaper price, a couple of weeks after the initial release, knowing fine well that the game will be £10/$15 cheaper than its brand new price.

If you are, then you probably don’t realise it but games companies think your being a bit rude. Think about the amount of times you’ve been into your local swap-shop and the friendly chap behind the counter says to you, as you walk toward the counter with a brand new box, “Do you know we’ve got a pre-owned version for £32 instead of £45?”

“I’ve been in a shop where I’ve tried to buy a copy of a relatively recent game, and I’ve taken an empty box off the shelf and they’ve given me a pre-owned copy. That, I think, is disgraceful,” said Elite Founder David Braben recently in an interview.

But is he right? Are games companies the ones getting harmed? The way i understand it, is that retailers buy directly from the publishers, in bulk and at trade value, so they are still getting the money they rightly deserve. Surely the only ones losing money are the retailers themselves.

Well, not so, the idea from a retailers point of view is that they encourage you to buy pre-owned as they make more money on them than brand new. Think about it. Lets say the a retailer buys the game at trade value, say £25 (i’m guesstimating). Customer A buys the brand new game in 2007 for £40. He trades it back to the store in early 2008, and gets about £12 from the shop, which he instantly spends back in the store (if you imagine most retailers give you credit notes as opposed to cold hard cash). Customer B wanders in and sees the now pre-owned title, and buys it for say £25. So now the shop has made £52 from these two exchanges. Now i’m no mathematician but that’s much more than if customer A had walked in, bought the game and never came back. If he’d have done that the shop makes £15, and customer B won’t exist.

Its just a simple case of win win…er…win. The publisher wins from the cash from the retailers. The Retailer wins, due to the infinite selling capabilities, and the customers win because we have the right to choose to buy a low cost game if we want to.

Developers have started using sneeky tactics to force gamers to buy brand new games. For example, if you want to play the extra multi-player level on Gears of War 2, you’d better buy it at full price, as it comes with a one-time download. And you can expect a whole lot more of that, as developers try to fill their pockets in the middle of the global credit crisis.

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