Hal Halpin: “Tensions Will Remain” As Pre-Owned Sales Grow

President and Founder of the Entertainment Consumer Association Hal Halpin has said tensions between publishers and retailers will remain as pre-owned videogame sales grow and more retailers take up the venture.

Talking to Nukezilla, Halpin has said that he thinks “those tensions [between publishers and retailers] will remain as we move further into the transition of digitally-distributed content and the next hardware cycle.”

Last week, we saw the number of retailers who sell pre-owned games rise in the UK by around a thousand year-on-year, according to industry site MCV. There are around 3,000 outlets who sell pre-owned games as a way to bolster revenue and attract customers back into the store once they’ve finished their games.

Large supermarkets such as Asda and Tesco have started accepting trade-ins, with the former this week pushing the service out to two thirds of its stores. ASDA made some headlines last week when it sold Fifa 11 for 97p if shoppers traded-in either Dead Rising 2 or Halo: Reach. This sort of aggressive trading is due to upset some specialist stores such as Game, who simply cannot compete to that extreme.

But it’s not just tension between competing stores. Publishers have been doing their bit to incentivise buying new games, so as to bypass the store’s pre-owned sales. EA’s Online Pass has been a controversial addition to their games, with players who buy pre-owned asked to shell out another $10 to use features such as multiplayer. This has been to the chagrin of some, who see this as publishers trying to squeeze more and more out of gamer’s wallets.

“With Sony’s announcement that the PS4 would remain a disc-based machine, it provides merchants with hope that digital won’t supplant them in the channel in a forced way, but rather that the market – consumers – will drive those purchase options and adoption,” said Halpin.

Yet, Game’s CEO Ian Shepherd remained defiant last week, saying that moves such as the Online Pass haven’t hurt the retailer’s bottom line. “Certainly, publishers are using content to extend the life of games to extend the reasons to keep them – that’s a good thing, as it’s good for us and we’ll sell more of the games,” he said. ”It’s still a strong part of our business.”

Some developers have even remained opposed to the idea all together. Last month Treyarch’s Mark Lamia said that it’s up to developers to give “consumers really great reasons to keep their games, rather than trade them in.”

Lamia’s comments are more hopeful, but there’s certainly a risk that pre-owned gamers will see more and more restrictions placed upon them, such as EA’s Online Pass. Worse, if we’re seeing less choice and certain items removed, only to be offered to us as DLC for $10, shouldn’t games be cheaper at retail?

Again, Halpin: “[This] changes the value proposition for consumers from a purchase-and-owned to purchase-and-licensed model, so the pricing of those products would need to be pretty radically altered to be justifiable.”

Digital services are all together a different story. The question, as Halpin notes, is who exactly owns what? “Where the rubber meets the road on digital distribution versus packaged goods sales, is centered around the rights issues. Who owns the content? Who licenses it, how, and under what conditions? And what pricing model is fair and prudent to the buyer and seller?”

Halpin said that he expects the used games debate to be settled by technology and the software publishers and that “retailers that sell and rent games will continue to until and unless the ability is removed.”