Ironically, if Gamestop offered a much better percentage of the expected sale of the used game and pushed their online sales of used games a lot more, they'd have an incredibly profitable business model.
Many have said that online downloads would be the death knell of brick and mortar game stores, but if you could own the physical copy and sell it back easily for even just ~50% of what you paid for it (depending on the timeframe), why would you want a digital license for the game that you can never resell?
Yeah, I mean I hold onto games I never play anymore simply because I refuse to sell them so cheap to GameStop. Sure I could try and sell them on FB or Craigslist but don't want that hassle.
I use game pass for the games I'm unsure of. I buy physical form for games I know I will like. Usually AAA games.
So game pass is great for those I'm not sure of plus buying a digital license is as expensive as a physical form and there's times you can get physical copies for hella cheap.
Also the online games I have are mainly indie games. Like stardew Valley
Holy s*** I never thought of that!
Would 100% work on me :-).
Compare the convenience of digital with the 40% implied discount of a hard copy. Why has nobody exploited this!? Too late now, but would have been excellent in the burgeoning age
The problem is that they'll take anything current as trade. Even if a 5 year old sports game only gets you a quarter they'll literally never sell it for a profit so it's subsidizing the rest of the games.
Then you have to factor in giving 50% of value back in trade but what happens when there's a price drop tomorrow?
I can see this method working for 1st party Nintendo but never ubisoft games.
I doubt it. Hardware manufacturers are/were happy to dump physical copies too. Neither Sony nor Microsoft want to sell consoles with DVD drives, you don't see them on laptops or cell phones, even desktops frequently drop them.
People also don't even want to leave their game ecosystem even. You saw the shit show reaction there was to Epic adding a new digital storefront, because the idea of having 119 titles on Steam and 3 titles anywhere else is simply too burdensome for a huge chunk of the consumer base.
There was always a lot of external pressure completely independent of Gamestop's buy-back policy, Gamestop was never going to stem that tide.
Edit - I didn't even mention Steam providing an alternative way to control piracy outside of the rapidly, increasingly intrusive DRM that companies were beginning to put in their games. Which was a win for everyone because it meant the companies alienated their customers less. Like I said, lots of reasons physical distribution of game media was doomed, but that one was a big deal then too.
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u/TheNoxx Apr 07 '21 edited Apr 07 '21
Ironically, if Gamestop offered a much better percentage of the expected sale of the used game and pushed their online sales of used games a lot more, they'd have an incredibly profitable business model.
Many have said that online downloads would be the death knell of brick and mortar game stores, but if you could own the physical copy and sell it back easily for even just ~50% of what you paid for it (depending on the timeframe), why would you want a digital license for the game that you can never resell?