Be Excellent To Each Other

Yet another PC game seller is hardly news, but the USP here is that they're going to allow you to sell back games you're done with. The catches however are multitude:

• The publisher gets to set the resale price (which I suspect means some just won't specify a resale price at all and disallow it)
• The consumer only gets 25% of the price from the sale
• You don't get cash for your games but rather Robot Cache's own cryptocurrency IRON. So, store credit essentially.

For me personally none of this is necessarily a deal-breaker. As someone who only plays single player game and never returns to one I've finished, my Steam library is completely dead money to me so getting anything back would be a bonus. I suspect I'm not the general case here though so I don't know how the idea will play out with everyone else.

I do wonder though about the publisher take-up. At the moment the vast majority of PC games are sold digitally and publishers don't even have to think about 'losing' money on second hand sales so why would they sign up for this if they don't have to (which they absolutely don't).

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018- ... your-games

Sounds reasonable, although i honestly don't how blockchain allows them to reduce costs as they claim. Also, I'm sure Steam could introduce a "cash in your old Steam keys for store credit" feature in about a weekend, if they wanted, although it wouldn't be quite the same.

Hey if you all give me your old games, I'll give you some magic beans.

I'm assuming I can buy new games with your magic beans because otherwise you wouldn't have bothered posting this so, yeah, it's a deal.

Except you can't give him your old games.

He made the offer, I can only assume he's solved that problem.

Yes I promise you will, and that promise is all you should possibly need to be convinced of this deal.

Edit: I didn't just mean Steam games, I'll take games on any format. I'll also take hardware, other devices, and any valuables.

The magic bean/game swapping worked quite well with Goozex (that became Playswap) on the consumer side. Then they went bust because even taking a monetary cut of all swaps made it wasn’t a viable business model.

Yeah it was a fundamentally broken market.

I've seen nothing to suggest this won't be.

Cryptocurrency is an idea with lots of potential when it matures, but why on earth would I want magic beans from a shop that I never had any intention to shop at, that I can't use for anything other than buying games from the shop.

I also imagine that given the numbers involved, you'll just be better off shopping around and buying your games from the cheapest retailer than you would tying yourself into one shop.

There is, or at least was, an area in London that some of you might know that had its own currency. My mum’s ex used to go there when I was little and I’d sometimes go along. It was mostly electronics shops he went to. But anyway, you could take things to sell for £sterling OR you could sell for this alternative currency, of which you’d get more. Then you could buy things and I think both currencies would be offered at the same price. So, you could sell a TV for £80 or 100 magic beans, and a new TV would cost you £100 or 100 magic beans.

Yeah, similar idea to this.

It's really just "store credit" unless they can provide some evidence to suggest it has utility beyond being store credit (which a strong cryptocurrency could have, but it would take a lot more than just being store credit for some games).

Hence my use of magic beans. They're offering you something that is probably functionally useless (except for as a store credit, no one else would ever accept this currency), with the suggestion that it might be of value beyond just being store credit.

Sterling is really just store credit that everyone accepts. Money is weird

Aye, Fiat currencies are only really of value because they are backed by governments, and their values would collapse if confidence in the government's continued existence collapsed.

Store credit in a shop that sells things I want > nothing at all. Nothing else you've said has any impact on that equation for me and your chat about magic beans is still missing that point given that I don't care about any further potential of their cryptocurrency. And I genuine don't believe anyone else will either; Game/CEX store credit has plenty enough utility without any other applications.

Which games that you want to buy will they sell?

GAME/CEX stock all the major console releases.