New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

January 21, 2010

Green Man Gaming is prepping its brand new digital distribution service for games that will feature a fresh twist—users will be able to trade-in previously purchased and downloaded games for credit.

The London-based firm is expecting to launch its service sometime in the first quarter of this year with some 400 available titles. More than 2,000 games should be available by years-end. Green Man Gaming also promises to “pay significant royalties to the publisher each time the game is traded in perpetuity.”

COO Gian Luzio added:

Previously the minute you had paid and downloaded your game it had no resale value. This is extremely expensive for the gamer and does not encourage the consumer to try new genres or franchises. Our leading edge technology gives downloaded games a value that gamers can trade-in at any time.

GP: Details are scarce and the website is still under construction, but popular conjecture is that the service will offer a user credits once a game is deleted off their PC, which wouldn’t make it exactly a trade-in service. Still, if this is how it works, it’s at least a little improvement over what is offered now by other digital delivery systems. We have a couple questions in to the company for further details and will update this story if they respond.

Update: That’s why they call it conjecture. A Green Man Gaming rep emailed us back to confirm that traded-in games will be resold as “used” games.

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Comments

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

Someone had to try this idea out first. Probably should have seen it coming ever since the whole digital distribution thing got used as a weapon vs used game retailers.

Will it work? Well, the game companies get paid a royalty on every exchange and the players get a cheaper price. Both of those ends are tied up and neither side gets short-changed. Really it all comes down to exactly how everything will be executed. I'm a big Steam user right now, but it'd be nice to be able to sell back games that it turns out I didn't like.

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

........ the DD system itself should allow for returns, 90% of retial price within the frist week, 40% the frist month(after the frist week), 25% there after.


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Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

Never underestimate computer geeks cause they will always win

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

If they make it hard to hack Im all up for this.

http://www.magicinkgaming.com/

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

"Hard to Hack" doesn't actually exist. No matter how much they spend on security and abusive DRM, there will be some hacker who finds a way around it, within a few months of it's release.

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

I can't wait for the hackers out there to find a way to fool the system into thinking the game was removed, when in reality, it's still on the computer. The more ingenius individuals out there will almost certainly find a way.

Also, how can a Downloaded game be resold as "used"? That makes NO sense. It's data. That data doesn't get worn down, or damaged, which is why the price on used games is lower than new. The potential for damage and wear and tear. Data isn't like that. Assuming that they are actually letting you download the same game as everyone else, you could be paying the discounted "used" price for the identical data as someone paying the "new" price..

This whole thing is utterly illogical.

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

Or breaking into accounts, deleting everything ,then usign the credit to buy themselves something.

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

A little improvement? I'm not so sure, I suppose it totally depends on how it's done. I like having games permanently attached to my Steam account, it makes reinstalling and revisiting them easy.

Re: New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

If at all it should only be offered as an option.

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