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GameStop Wants To Sell Secondhand Digital Download Video Games
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."
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.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
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.
It also means there's no returning a stinker though. It's rare that I buy a game soon after it comes out. It's also rare that a game I'm counting down the days until release turns out to be bad, but it has happened. Kingdom hearts 2 for example, I bought it new the day after it was released, and sold it back to gamestop about a week later. I really hated it, but ended up spending less than $10 on it because I was able to sell it back.
Not saying it helps overall, but in a few rare cases it does work out better for us.
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.
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