How many times have you said to yourself, “I’d like to play that game, but I think I’ll wait until it’s cheaper”? I’d bet that many of you say that quite often (given that I see that comment on various gaming forums almost every day). Now, I can’t blame you; money is often in limited supply and there are so many cool games deserving of your time. That said, what you are really saying is that you aren’t willing to buy a game new at retail price and instead are going to wait until you can buy it used, or perhaps wait until it becomes a Greatest Hits release (maybe eBay, etc…) for less money.

The problem of course, is that every time you buy a used game at GameStop, the game makers never see a dime of your purchase. Lately, game companies have been trying to figure out a way to kill the resale business. They want to try digital distribution (which many gamers are against for various reasons, such as wanting a physical copy of a game). They want to try various DRMs to make you register a game to your PC (or console) so that it can only be played on that one machine. They want to try a bunch of things, but what they don’t want to try is lowering the price of the game.

In other words, game companies don’t want to hear that you aren’t interested in spending $60+ for their new game. Instead, they choose to pray (I suppose) that you are the minority and that there will be many others who will buy the game at full retail price, preferably sometime within a couple weeks of release. We all know this doesn’t happen though. For the few blockbuster games with enough hype to stir the masses into a buying frenzy, there are many more games not selling to their full potential.

This leads me to wonder, when people say that they’ll wait for game ‘X’ to lower to price ‘Y’, what is this mystery price they are thinking of? Is it half the cost of the game upon release? If so, then wouldn’t it be in the best interest of game companies, to lower the price in the first place? I mean; I know that games these days can cost serious money to make, but if lowering the price could eliminate people waiting to buy the used copies of those who trade in said games, thus keeping the resale cycle in business, wouldn’t it behoove the game companies to give it a try?

It could be a win/win for everyone. Gamers can buy more games and game companies could stand to make more money with increased sales of new copies (over a longer period of time I might add). Of course this would all depend on how much of an increase in sales each game would receive. So I ask you this…

If games cost $30 instead of $60, would you be more inclined to buy games new rather than used? If at the same time, a used copy of a game that sold new for $30 was on a shelf for $25 (based on the current GS way of pricing used games $5 less than a new copy), would you be more likely to spring that extra $5 under these circumstances, if it meant that you’d be giving the company who actually made the game some money too?

Does anyone else think it is worth a try?