Do industry professionals buy new or used?

[leunas]

Gamasutra asked a tough question this week of their "game industry professionals, educators and students": Do they buy used games or "go out of [their] way" to buy new ones? Good question.

Of course, developers would prefer to buy new, it's in their best economic interest to support each other. They did say that the used market would be dead in the water once digital distribution took over. Although publishers still screw gamers with digital distribution -- charging them the $10 mark-up that brick and mortar stores tag on legitimately to stay in business. Even if digital distribution would take over tomorrow, gamers would be shafted with over-priced product, without the recourse of selling that game to recoup some of the losses.

There are some good quotes in the piece and the battle rages on between new and used games. Now we'd like to see a question regarding the best economic model for fiscally conservative gamers: Renting.



feeds.joystiq.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~3/40185835/

[Stuff]

Boy there's a bunch of games in the past that I've bought and wished I had just rented it first. Gotta drive that into my skull.

Digital Distribution; I first assumed he's talking about the Wii, which I thought would have game downloads at varied prices. So then is he talking about PC games for "$10 mark-up"?

[leunas]

The concept of digital distribution is actually referring to current and next-gen consoles as well as pcs.

Wii - with the virtual console looming, it makes perfect sense. Think of all the Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Zelda, Phantasy Star collections available for you to download.

Xbox360 - the Live Arcade has already capitalized on this with many games on board. The highly anticipated Castlevania:Symphony of the Night and XNA further reinforces the premise behind this.

PS3 - though nothing yet has transpired(Dec 3, how many delays?), the idea that Sony has adopted the linux OS for their system leads to many speculations:

• word processing, spreadsheet?
  
• homebrew?
  
• cross-platform
  

depending on how it is presented along with the integration of the PSP, this could prove interesting.

PC - the leader in digital distribution. with games like doom, diner dash among many other things show that games without boxes and/or optic drives available makes for a more smooth transition. yahoo games, realarcade, and msn games have already capitalized on this.