100 Million Used Games Traded Each Year In the US

We occasionally discuss the complaints from video game publishers and developers about how used game sales are hurting them, and how they've been testing out countermeasures disguised as features to compensate. Now, industry analyst Michael Patcher has released a report which attempts to quantify that damage. Patcher estimates that used game sales and trades number around 100 million each year in the US. However, despite the immense number of transactions, he doesn't think the used game market is as detrimental to sales of new games as the publishers think. "The vast majority of used games are not traded in until the original new game purchaser has finished playing, typically well beyond the window for a full retail priced new game sale. Thus, while there may be some limited substitution of used game purchases when GameStop employees 'push' used merchandise upon consumers lined up to buy new games, the vast majority of used game purchases occur more than two months after a new game is released. ... To the extent that there is a substitution effect, we estimate that fewer than 5% of new game sales are impacted."

Comments

Re:Seriously...

[advocate_one]

Even candy is labelled "no individual re-sell".

no, sorry, that only applies to candy and other goods sold in multi-packs and is there to stop unscrupulous retailers from purchasing multi-packs and then splitting them and selling the individual packs at the normal single pack price...

Re:So should book publishers try to prevent tradin

[dontPanik]

Book publishers have a great racket where if they want to make more money on books and prevent people (esp. college students) from reusing books, they put out a new edition.

Just fix a few typos, and voila! It's like you have a new book to sell.
And if you dare try to walk into a college class with the old edition you are SURE to fail...

Nutrition analysis

[FooAtWFU]

The actual labels you'll see is "This unit not labelled for individual retail sale", meaning that it doesn't have the nutrition facts on the individual packets, and probably runs afoul of some regulatory agency (FDA) if you try to sell it by itself.

And what's so "unscrupulous" about splitting up a multi-pack? That's half of what retailers are there for: so you don't have to order things by the pallet.