DO WE NEED A
SECONDARY MARKET FOR DIGITAL VIDEO GAMES?
Nicholas Gilet, co-CEO of the
Ultra.io gaming hub, insists there’s considerable interest in secondary digital games sales and publishers don’t ever have to lose out
T
Nicholas Gilet, co-CEO of the
Ultra.io gaming hub
he UK was once home to a vibrant pre- owned games market. According to Kantar, this was worth £123 million in 2015, but by
2022, the research firm reported the market’s value at £21.3 million, a fall of approximately 83%. The obvious primary culprit for this decline is the rising prominence of digital marketplaces across PC and console - accelerated by the global pandemic - with many consumers now exclusively buying digital versions of games. GFK Entertainment claims that the overall boxed
games market in the UK was worth £489 million in 2022. For comparison, Omdia valued digital PC sales at £660 million and digital console sales at £1.98 billion. With the latest generation of consoles offering diskless versions at cheaper price points and physical releases increasingly limited to major publishers and franchises, boxed games are now an endangered species. The rise of digital means publishers can enjoy a
simplified, more profitable distribution model with fewer middlemen. Consumers, too, are clearly on board with the trend. But it does throw up some thorny issues around how we play and collect video games - and whether we now own them at all - that
42 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2023
mean a secondary market for digital games is a concept that needs to be explored.
PRE-OWNED CRASH As digital becomes the chosen point of purchase for the vast majority of gamers, its convenience comes at the cost of ownership. Digital software can’t be resold or traded in, with players purchasing a licence to play a game rather than the game itself - effectively loaning it from the seller. This situation has numerous parallels in the worlds of TV, film and music and means there is no pre-owned market of any significance for digital games. Consumer rights around digital purchases have
been a battleground in the PC gaming space for years, with ongoing battles for consumers to get the same protections they do when purchasing physical goods from retailers. Despite this, today’s gamers still don’t get the full benefits that come with genuine ownership. A lot of this boils down to the historically
fraught relationship between the games industry and retailers around sales of pre-owned titles. One developer even suggested to this magazine that pre-owned games are a bigger problem than piracy.
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