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New US Retailer Promises to Share Used Game Sales with Publishers
EKGaming, the new used game store on the block, has promised to share revenue earned from used game sales with publishers – unlike other stores who merely keep the cash for themselves.
All game sales, which they promise will be 20 to 30 percent lower than other retail competitors, will shave off 10% to be given back to the game publishers (so says their website).
“This is an exciting endeavour and one we hope will, over time, minimize the “bleeding” caused from used games sales.”
A costly endeavor you might think, but EKG is going the route of online only, cutting the initial price of being a brick-and-mortar retailer.
EKG believes that used game sales have increased the amount of online passes, DLC and digital-exclusive sales, and have negatively impacted gamers “who just want to do what they have done since the dawn of the gaming industry some 35 plus years ago; that is buying, selling, trading and collecting physical game media in the form of cartridges, floppy disks and more recently game disks.”
It hopes that passing money back into the hands of publishers will help create a “circle of life” between sales and publishing.
Mike Kennedy, CEO of EKG, argues that even gamers will benefit from this new approach, as game publishers might be more approachable about taking risks in the development process, seeing as they’ll have cash trickling back from used sales:
“Publishers are spending record amounts of cash on new game development.
This increase in dev costs is steering them in directions that don’t necessarily jive with gamers, causing them to take less risks on new and potentially exciting IP’s or game mechanics and sticking with tried and true properties that are more of a guarantee.
“We want to share our used game revenue with them so they can continue investing in new gaming experiences without worrying about the negative effects used games could be having on their operation(s).”
On the spot, I have to say it’s a grand idea – albeit a very, very, very bold one. It could very well work, and it could also very well change how the industry views used game sales — not to mention affecting developer and publisher opinion on DRM and one-time-use codes for unlocks.
What say you, video game consumer?
[via EuroGamer]
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this picture highly accurate. At least here i in my country
If used games are such a market drain like the developers claim(I highly doubt because someone had to have purchased the game new for it to be used) this may seem like a good idea my only concern is that this will not stop the greed practices that hurt the consumers, we seem to be too gullible as a whole to stop falling for these practices, its a sad time to be a gamer.
Why 10%? The devs take the risks, they make these games for years, and they publish them… Shouldn’t it be more like 10% to used game sellers and 90% to the people who ACTUALLY MAKE THE GAMES? This is so jacked up it’s almost worth crying over… Though, I’m not feeling sorry for devs.
I’ve been on a recent campaign to buy every good game full retail (spent over freaking 400 bucks in the last two years just on xbox titles!). And after the mess that was Mass Effect 3, I feel like my money is going towards half baked products… I guess I’ll be buying games used from now on… I’m tired of these guys screwing around with content…
That Arby n’ Chief Bytes episode with the cookies pretty much sums it up…