WHY WE NEED THE PRE-OWNED MARKET

Whilst trading in games and buying them pre-owned is regarded by games publishers as the great Satan for the end user it can be a God send.

In the past year or so we have seen EA launch their campaign against the pre-owned market in the form of 'Project $10' which was targeted directly at those who buy their games second hand.  The basic principle is that if you buy one of EA games second hand then in order to take advantage of the games online functionality you need to pay EA an additional amount of money to buy an online pass code.  If you bought the game new then the pass code comes included in the box however it is a use once only deal. 

The idea behind this is two fold.  To encourage people to buy their games brand new and to drive down the demand for trading their games in and buying them second hand.  The first is an easy concept to appreciate, but the latter is quite sneaky on the part of EA.

You see, when you come to trade in an EA game you are less likely to receive as much money in the trade in.  Why?  Well because the store trading in the game will now need to sell it pre-owned at a reduced price in order to make it attractive for any potential buyer.  If in the past you got say £19.99 on the trade in, the store could sell it second hand for £29.99 and there would still be those who would buy it.  Effectively they would be saving £10 on the purchase.  Now with Project $10 that is not the case.  If you bought the game at £29.99 and then had to pay £10 for the online pass then you are effectively paying full price for a second hand game.  The alternative is that you are paying a second hand price for an incomplete game.

What EA are effectively doing is driving away the demand for their games to be traded.  No one wants to get a pittance for trading in a game and no one wants to pay anything approaching the normal price for a second hand game that they will need to pay extra for in order to get the full benefit from it so the demand suddenly drops off.

OK, this is nothing new, but it now seems that more and more publishers are going to go down this route.  THQ have already done this with Homefront whereby you can only rank up so far without needing to put in the online pass code and no doubt others will follow suite.  The more take this up, the tighter the squeeze will be on the pre-owned market.

So why do we need the pre-owned market?

Well, I look at it this way.  There are many games I have in my collection that I would not have purchased had I not had a wedge of completed games to trade in.  Usually these are games that I would not normally buy but ones I take a punt on when shopping for other titles because they effectively cost me next to nothing when offset against the trade in.  This Friday I hope to get a 3DS but the only way I can afford one at the moment is by trading in a shopping bag full of games that I have completed and have no intention on revisiting.  If the trade in was no longer there, I simply would have to re-evaluate my purchases.  In other words, I would have to spend far less on games and be more prudent in what I buy.

It is fair to say that it won't be the big publishers that will lose out, but the smaller ones as it tends to be them that have the less attractive titles, or certainly the ones that you are more likely to have to take a punt on.  Whilst the likes of EA and Activision and so on massage their huge bank balances the smaller publishers will see a tail off in sales because fewer people will be in a position to take a chance on their games.  How can that possibly be good for the industry?

I also don't agree with the sentiment that EA and the others are right to do this.  You can argue that they are fed up with stores like Game pocketing the whole profits from the second hand sales, but so what if they do?  EA pocket a huge amount of cash from the sale of the new title and that's all they should be entitled to.  If you sell a car second hand are the car manufacturers entitled to a cut of the money?  Same with any other appliance around the home?  Once the manufacturer has produced the goods and sold them, that is all they are entitled to.  What it amounts to is sheer greed by the large publishers who don't need the money.  They don't like the fact that someone else is making a cut out of their titles.

The bottom line is that we need the pre-owned market.  Without it we are going to sweep the legs out from under the industry and the long term losers, as always, will be the consumer.