David Braben: Pre-owned Sales Are “really damaging”

In a recent interview with gamesindustry.biz, chairman of Frontier Developments, David Braben, reaffirmed his opinions and ideas surrounding the second-hand game market.

Games like BioShock and Assassin’s Creed, where they’re perfectly valid games but once you’ve played them they go into the pre-owned section – the sales don’t reflect the actual sales of people playing them because someone has gone out and bought, at almost the same price, a pre-owned copy because they couldn’t get an original. It’s very frustrating that they don’t carry that stock anymore.

He also spoke about how he sees a possible solution to this apparent problem being a two-tier system with games, where two versions are produced. One for sale, another for cheap rental.

That’s a grand idea, but still won’t solve the problem that sometimes people want to sell their games on after they are done with them. Something especially prevalent with single-player, story driven games. It sucks that these re-sales don’t count towards the game’s sales figures, but that’s what happens.

The second-hand market isn’t harming the videogame industry, far from it. The fact that more people are playing the game the developer made, people who do not want to pay the premium associated with buying the game new, is a good thing.

I think Jim Sterling from Destructoid said it best:

The fact of the matter is, and I guess I need to repeat myself for those publishers at the back of the class — used sales are a part of life. Someone buys a product, someone finishes the product, someone sells the product on. You may claim to still “own” a videogame after purchase, but that is never going to work in practice until digital distribution takes hold. So suck it up like every other industry, stop getting greedy, and patiently wait until the download market gives you the stranglehold on game sales that you so desperately crave.