Comments on: A Second-Hand Market For Download Games?

By: Fraggle

Fraggle — Sat, 15 May 2010 16:50:36 +0000

Until contracts presented to the retail public take less than 10 seconds to read and understand, there is nothing moral about them, regardless of how legal they are. The reason nobody reads them is because they are designed to not be read.

By: ayreon

ayreon — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:43:12 +0000

Just another good example: Gladriel
Not mentioning GameStop and others earning billions per year from this market

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:45:48 +0000

Sorry…of course there is a second hand PC game market. There are no laws preventing reselling of PC games in the first place.

Also there is alot of talk on here about the price of the games, but just doing a quick comparison on Steam for the latest games with HMV, Amazon and Play.com and Steam costs more….on all counts.

Go figure.

For a license.

Seriously?

I would expect if these greenman guys have any sense they will also be looking to at more than just PC games since Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all have online games available for download now and it will only be a matter of time before all the latest games are wholly available for download off of Xbox Live for example.

Publishers may be fighting the second hand games market but I can assure you the developers would love to see some more of that money come back to them to cover their ever spiralling costs.

By: heartlessgamer

heartlessgamer — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:54:06 +0000

@carra

You can already buy gift copies of Steam games during sales and resell them to your hearts content.

By: Fumarole

Fumarole — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:39:48 +0000

Well now I do.

By: Carra

Carra — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:56:19 +0000

Reselling makes no sense indeed. If I buy a second hand book it’s got a few rimples. A cd will have a few scratches. A car will have less kilometers to be driven with. But some bytes? They’re exactly the same as new.

So the only difference value is in what people give them. And that’s usually just wanting the newest, shiniest games.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:25:39 +0000

Whilst this does seem like another vapourware internet project there are ways of managing sales prices. You could set an upper limit on the ammount of stock you carry. Say no more than 10,000 copies of Stalker and then you no longer accept new sellers. If you know you’ll likely sell 1,000 copies a month due to the games track record then you can be sure to make a profit, even if the seller is making a profit before you.

After all not all buyers are savvy enough to know when a sale may be or even that there are sales.

By: Hrmmmm

Hrmmmm — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:59:17 +0000

That pic looks NSFW to me.

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:18:06 +0000

There isn’t a second-hand PC game market to be killed in the first place. The EULA prevents you from transferring the license to a retailer (or anybody else), meaning they can’t sell it because they can’t own it. Console games can be resold because the user doesn’t have a EULA shoved in their face before being able to use it.

Publishers would be insane to endorse any kind of second-hand PC game market, and we would be insane to encourage it because it just takes even more money out of the developers pocket. If publishers were somehow forced to accept it -eg. if EULA turns out to be worthless- either new prices would go up to account for the future resale value, or they would just decide the PC version is no longer worthwhile. Either way we lose.
—-

As for a digital second-hand market – why would a publisher ever agree to that? I just can’t get my head around how this is supposed to make sense for either Green Man or the publisher concerned. OK, so the publisher makes some money out of the sale, but surely they’d have been better off just making that sale at the same price on Steam and getting a bigger cut?

The only way this makes sense is for the Green Man price to be less than the Steam Price, and for the Green Man cut + Player cut combined to be less than the Steam cut. But if that’s possible, why wouldn’t Green Man just sell a ‘new’ digital copy for the hypothetical second hand price (ie. less than Steam) and split the now-non-existent-Player cut between themselves and the publisher?

By: bookwormat

bookwormat — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:10:09 +0000

@arqueturus

According to most Eula’s you never own software anyway do you? Regardless of the media it’s stored on. You just have a licence to use it.

That is correct, but you can own the license to use it. As if you buy a book,: where you never own the rights on the content that is in the book , but have all rights to sell or read or burn the book (== the “license to read”) as you please.

By: Vinraith

Vinraith — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:48:31 +0000

@bookwormat

Valve is simply an example there, virtually every EULA in existence is pretty clearly drafted under the assumption that 90% of the customer base will never read it. Digital services can be even more certain of this because of the “instant gratification” factor, but it’s known widely enough that no one reads these things.

Good thing, too, as CMaster’s right about the questionable legality of many of them.

By: Smurfy

Smurfy — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:18:36 +0000

They aim to have more than double Steam’s catalogue by the end of the year.

…

Good luck.