Why the death of pre-owned will be a disaster for traditional publishers

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It looks today as if the writing is on the wall for UK specialist retailer GAME, which is unable to stock forthcoming games from EA or Nintendo, presumably because its suppliers can’t secure appropriate credit insurance.

I was interviewed for Eurogamer’s excellent piece on what the world would look like without GAME. In it, I suggested that pre-owned was good for publishers. Here’s why.

Pre-owned is key to initial sales

GAME and HMV would be in far more trouble were it not for the booming pre-owned/trade-in/second-hand business, however much it antagonises potential publisher allies. But losing so much of this prospering pre-owned business could have undesirable ramifications, as Nicholas Lovell explains.

“Pre-owned says to punters that when you pay for this piece of content you will be able to sell it again. Therefore, your average purchase price is not £40 – it’s £40 minus the trade-in price. It’s not a £40 investment, it’s a £10 investment. And a bunch of people then don’t return it, they hold onto it.

“If you took away the opportunity to say ‘it’s only a tenner’,” he adds, “it’s entirely possible that the new-sales market would be much smaller than it would with pre-owned. People umming and ahhhing about whether or not to fork out are far worse than people who splash the cash because they know they can either take it back or get a return on their money.”

For the full article, head over to Eurogamer.

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