Eidos President Latest To Complain About Used Game Sales
Ian Livingstone, president of Eidos and apparent crankyface, has become the latest game publishing executive to complain that used game sales don't make him any richer. Livingstone complained to the BBC that used game sales deny developers and publishers "a slice of the action":
The pre-owned market is a serious problem, because there is no benefit to developers or publishers...A shop makes a bigger margin on a pre-owned title, and can sell them six or seven times, so there is no incentive for them to reorder and the content creator gets no slice of the action.
With digital distribution bearing down on us like a DRM'd big brother, the days of used game sales are numbered regardless of which way (or even whether) the industry eventually decides to deal with them. Once digital distro takes over, the question of what to do with a used physical game copy becomes moot.
In the meantime, it's hard to sympathize with executives who expect gamers and retailers to treat game copies like rented information rather than the hard purchases they are. Can you imagine a GM executive complaining that used car sales give too much savings to the consumer while denying the original manufacturer a chance to get paid twice for the same machine?
Pre-owned sales have "no benefit" to publishers - Livingstone [GamesIndustry.biz]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 21 August 2009
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: eidos, ian livingstone, used game sales, used games
Publishers are behaving like spoiled children with comments on pre-owned.
The pre-owned market has the effect that the publisher's own back-catalogue of games (being resold) is keeping them honest about the pricing of new games. Otherwise I am sure they would all try to get us to pay a lot more for a lot less.
I agree completely Deco, sounds like they're being just plain greedy at this point with that statement he said. I personally think they have no right to reign over used copies of games that were originally purchased at full head on price either. If they wanted to make more profit off of a game; maybe they should invest in creating a better game, or put more quality into the development on their projects to provoke people to initially make those 1st release purchases as a whole, instead of being unsure over a game and waiting for it to go into the used bin before giving it a try. Like Tiny said, I agree it just keeps them honest in their practice somewhat and in their work.
I hate this shift to digital downloads. I like owning the box and cd for my games and music since I'm a collector. If they shift to digital downloads, then they should bring down the price of the games by ten to twenty dollars at least.