Jugaccino

David Braben, the founder of Elite, has told EuroGamer exactly how he feels about retail game swap-shops, such as Gamestation, Game and other private companies.

Braben says: “We’ve got a lot of retailers eating our lunch and refusing to sell full-priced games. 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. Not holding stock of new games, substituting them with pre-owned games at the same or much the same price… That is really destroying the shelf-life of our games.”

“The shops are not giving us a way of distinguishing between pre-owned and new. So the shops are essentially defrauding the industry,” he added

“My argument is that for every game there are two versions. One is personal, not for resale and it’s made abundantly clear you can’t sell it. And it’s made available for something like GBP 25. And a resale and rental copy, which in film is actually about GBP 80.”

Although many developers are ok with game swapping, many developers are searching for ways to make their money, and some are using free one-time downloads to make users buy the game brand new.

Perhaps Braben is right to say the developers are hurting, but retailers must be feeling the effects to, so it’s a bit of a two-way street. Selling something at half or even a tenth of the price, is hardly going to pay the sales assistants wages.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.