If you step into any gaming store, you will see a large variety of both new and pre-owned games. But for gaming stores such as Gamestop, selling pre-owned games can often be more important than selling the brand new ones. Why? Because when a new game is sold, part of the profit goes back to the publishers of the game. But when a pre-owned game is sold, 100% of the profit goes to the store. And publishers are not happy with this at all ... especially considering the ridiculously inflated price that pre-owned games (no matter how poor their condition) are being sold for.

Last week GameStop announced Holiday sales up 45%. Games retailers en masse are whoopin’ it up, selling heaps of games. Which is wonderful for them, because, due to the lucrative used-games business they get to sell those little boxes of joy all over again.

The silent fury of publishers toward their retail “partners” is a palpable force in game industry politics. Retailers such as GameStop, with its powerful network of 5,000 frontline stores, are coining up to $1 billion a year in used game revenues in North America alone. Add Europe and you’ve got to think about almost doubling that number.

Publishers don’t see a dime, nor even a eurocent of the money.

But games often turn up second-hand days after on sale date, and can be marked down by as little as $5 off the original asking price. They’re being sold alongside the new product. Given that the retailer is giving Johnny Consumer a store-credit of no more than $15 to $20 for his game, you can see who is making out big on this.

So the publisher-paid ads are paying to promoting hot new games that the publishers spent millions developing but for which they paid dick after the first sale.

Miss Razz via next-gen.biz »