Dyack: Pre-Owned Increases the Cost of Games

The collapse of UK specialist retailer GAME has led to a lot of reflection in the industry. Silicon Knights boss Denis Dyack has done some thinking, and come to the conclusion that the pre-owned games sector is to blame for the high cost of product at retail.

“I would argue that used games actually increase the cost of games," Dyack said in a recent interview. "There used to be something in games for 20 years called a tail, where say you have a game called Warcraft that would sell for 10 years. Because there are no used games, you could actually sell a game for a long time, and get recurring revenue for quite a while.

"Now there is no tail. Literally, you will get most of your sales within three months of launch, which has created this really unhealthy extreme where you have to sell it really fast and then you have to do anything else to get money.

"Used games are cannibalizing the industry. If developers and publishers don't see revenue from that, it's not a matter of hey 'we're trying to increase the price of games to consumers, and we want more', we're just trying to survive as an industry. So I think that's inflated the price of games, and I think that prices would have come down if there was a longer tail, but there isn't."

Source: GamesIndustry