http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-05-22-gamestop-president-ps4-and-xbox-one-games-can-be-resold
Quote:
GameStop president Tony Bartel has reassured consumers that next-gen games will be able to be bought and sold on the pre-owned market, and explained why that is important as consoles transition.
"Both Sony and Microsoft have said games can be resold and that's exactly what we anticipated. It's a recognised way to make these games more affordable. All three new platforms understand that," Bartel told Forbes.
Harrison suggested there was an announcement to come about this too.
My take is: GameStop and other affiliated retailers will be able to pay MS a fee to unlock pre-owned games they get in. So, effectively, MS get a cut of preowned sales. Or another way to look at it: retail still gets to sell us preowned copies at a £5 discount over new, while we can no longer lend, trade, or give old games away to friends. The worst of all worlds, then. Fuck.
Y'know, this makes perfect sense. Games publishers weren't looking at the vast piles of cash made by the likes of GameStop on preowned sales and thinking,
We must stop this evil. They were thinking:
We gotta get us some of that. And this is how.
So it looks like: pre-owned game is traded into GameStop. GameStop pay a fee to Microsoft (which kicks back to the publisher), Microsoft disable the game registration attached to the old console and open it back up to the next one its played in. Sometime in the next 24 hours, the console belonging to the person who traded it in deactivates the game. Someone new receives the disc, the servers know that this disc has been marked as "preowned and available", and it installs and plays as normal.
This is what I expect, and this is why I said it will drive prices up. If retailers increase the price of preowned to include MS's effective preowned tax, you can be sure that they'll also increase new prices.
I expect they'll have a solution for affiliated rental services like Blockbuster and Lovefilm too.