Nintendo: Beat the Pre-Owned Problem by Making Better Games

Nintendo's still has some fight left in it. Reggie Fils-Aime, the boss of Nintendo America, has suggested that publishers can avoid the 'problem' of pre-owned by simply making better games. Sounds like a decent solution.

The exec pointed out that Nintendo has the lowest software trade-in rate of any platform holder. To the Wii U maker, pre-owned is not an issue if you make a game that is able to retain value for a long period of time.

"We have been very clear, we understand that used games are a way for some consumers to monetize their games, Fils-Aime said. "They will buy a game, play it, bring it back to their retailer to get credit for their next purchase.

"Certainly, that impacts games that are annualized and candidly also impacts games that are maybe undifferentiated much more than [it] impacts Nintendo content. Why is that? Because the replayability of our content is super strong. The consumer wants to keep playing Mario Kart. The consumer want to keep playing New Super Mario Bros. They want to keep playing Pikmin. So we see that the trade-in frequency on Nintendo content is much less than the industry average – much, much less.

"So for us, we have been able to step back and say that we are not taking any technological means to impact trade-in and we are confident that if we build great content, then the consumer will not want to trade in our games."

Fils-Aime also added that he felt the positive reaction to Sony's E3 press conference was more of an 'anti-Microsoft' response, and that third party publishers won't rock the boat and implement their own anti-used strategy in game DRM.

Source: Polygon