Pre-owned

I'm ambivalent about the whole pre-owned games market. For one thing, I'm a terrible hoarder, who for some reason has a copy of Duke Nukem 64 within cat-swinging distance, even though I've never owned an N64. Must have been a housemate's. Needless to say, I've never traded a game in. I try to avoid buying pre-owned games, on the presumption that they'll inevitably be of inferior quality than new, only taking the plunge when the game is sufficiently rare and old, like my copy of Super Mario World for GBA.

There's a lot of brouhaha about it siphoning off game sales that would normally go to the creators of the work; on the other hand, people have a right to do with their property whatever they want, including reselling.

The main problem I see with this market is that it takes place in the exact same shops that the new games market also occupies. Waterstones don't sell used books; Next and H&M don't sell second-hand clothes, and as for reselling pre-owned beer, well, that's taking the piss (and selling it). The only industry I can think of where the goods are used and resold by the original vendors is the car industry. I honestly wonder what the reaction would be if I took some CDs and DVD to HMV and tried to pawn them. "You do it for games, why not DVDs?" I'd whine, before they lamped me.

Having the slightly-foxed copy on the exact same shelves as the unspoilt new copy, at a cheaper price, means that surely the only people who'll pay the premium are the believers and fusspots such as myself. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle, and retailers won't give up this profitable revenue stream. Nothing we can do but wait and see, and buy new games whenever possible.