Key Takeaways
- Steam lets users sell digital items & could facilitate resale of digital games to benefit gamers, developers, & platforms.
- Digital used game sales mirror used physical game sales but bring in money for developers & platforms through resale.
- Reselling digital games provides value to gamers with access to cheaper copies & developers earning money on resold games.
One of the best things about physical games is that you can sell them or even give them away once you’re done with them. With digital download games, most of us have titles clogging up our virtual shelves and the only way to get rid of them is hiding or deleting them from your library permanently. So why not let us sell them to someone else? Could it work?
I Have 1000s of Digital Games I Am Done With
There are thousands of games spread across my various digital libraries. I have never finished most of them, since only a few games have interested me for long enough to see the end credits. I don’t consider that an issue, because, wherever a game loses my interest is where I got my money’s worth from it.
There are a small number of games that I have played to completion repeatedly, including titles like Diablo II, DOOM, Mass Effect, Nier Automata and so on. However, the vast majority of games in my library I’ve tried once, maybe finished, and then moved on. Incidentally, this is also why subscription services for games work well for me, but I still have these virtual piles of games that I’d like to get rid of somehow, and maybe get some of my money back. Just as I did with my physical games.
Steam Already Has a Way to Sell Digital Stuff to Other Players
Interestingly, the largest digital storefront on PC, Steam, already has a system in place where customers can sell digital items among themselves. It’s just that these are limited to the trading cards you earn while playing certain games. You can put the cards you earn up for sale on the open market, and if someone buys the card, Steam takes a cut, and you get the rest deposited in your Steam wallet.
Users have also figured out ways to sell items like CS:GO skins, or gold in MMOs. Game developers have tried to clamp down on this sort of thing, but that hasn’t stopped third-party services connecting buyers and sellers of sought-after digital goodies.
The fact of the matter is that there’s no technical reason why digital game storefronts couldn’t facilitate the resale of games. Most importantly, this doesn’t run the risk of flooding out the sale of new copies of the game, because there are only a finite number of used digital copies in circulation, and only a small subset of owners who want to sell theirs.
Digital Used Sales Solve the Used Physical Game Problem
Apart from a little bit of legal tweaking to software licenses, the only thing that stands in the way of platforms like Steam letting us sell our digital games is convincing publishers, developers, and the platforms themselves that this makes good business sense.
The world of used physical game sales notoriously cuts the original creator out of subsequent transactions. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but that’s why we started seeing tactics like single-use DLC or multiplayer mode keys in games that would not transfer to the next owner.
With used digital games, the marketplace would likely include a percentage cut for the game publisher and the platform itself. This means that every resale of a used digital game brings in some money to the original content creators, and again, there’s only a limited pool of used copies available at any one time. If those dry up, then players have to buy a new copy.
Of course, how much could you realistically get for your used game? So many digital games go on deep sales every few months, and there’s definitely a trend towards devaluing older games that are the hot new title of the day. Just as with the Steam trading cards, the prices will be determined by supply and demand. Then again, it’s not like used game stores ever paid premium prices for your used games, so apart from giving a cut of the sale to the developers, it’s not that different.
Everyone Wins
Regardless of whether you can get more for a game than you paid, or only a few cents on the dollar, it’s a net win compared to a digital game that’s literally worthless to you sitting in your virtual game library. In this scenario, everyone wins. Gamers get access to cheaper used copies of games, or games that may not be for sale anymore.
Used games will be available even when new copies are not on sale. Developers get to generate income from the resale of games that have already been sold. Platforms like Steam get access to another market to skim from, and if there’s high demand for a game, new copies will still sell. So come on guys, you know that’s what we want.
