Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to re-introduce you to David Braben. The Frontier Developments boss has already slammed pre-owned games in the past, falsely claiming that other industries don’t tolerate the practice and asking for retail chains to replace pre-owned titles with a rental service.
Well, he’s at it again: “I think it’s really damaging to the single-player experience,” whines Braben. “Games like BioShock and Assassin’s Creed, where they’re perfectly valid games, but once you’ve played them they go into the pre-owned section.
“The sales don’t reflect the actual sales of people playing them because someone has gone out and bought, at almost the same price, a pre-owned copy because they couldn’t get an original,” he said. “It’s very frustrating that they don’t carry that stock any more.” Braben also once again asks for a “genuine rental market,” believing that cheap rentals would be an adequate replacement for pre-owned games.
The fact of the matter is, and I guess I need to repeat myself for those publishers at the back of the class — used sales are a part of life. Someone buys a product, someone finishes the product, someone sells the product on. You may claim to still “own” a videogame after purchase, but that is never going to work in practice until digital distribution takes hold. So suck it up like every other industry, stop getting greedy, and patiently wait until the download market gives you the stranglehold on game sales that you so desperately crave.
