The answer to the first question depends on how "new" and "hot" the game is. In the case of someone like myself, who always sells early in a game's life cycle because if I like a game I keep it, usually in the ball park of 75%. PC game values drop faster than those of any other game types, and after a few years you're usually looking at 10% of initial value or so. I'm not sure what most people would pay for support, but I'm guessing very little. $5, perhaps, but that'd come straight out of the resale value of the game. Let's face it, for most games (Stardock obviously excluded) the support provided isn't worth much.

That's the thought, yeah. I know it's true of me, whether it's true of enough people to make the whole thing work for the publisher I'm not certain, but I think it'd be interesting to find out.

Expenditure is a zero sum game, more money wont fall from the sky.  That lack of a used market will directly translate to a drop in discretionary spending that matches the income going towards used goods.  It may not be a 1/1 ratio on pc game sales, but it's close enough that you're going to take a hit if you kill it off.

No, there shouldn't be a secondary market for software.

I strongly disagree. If the software costs a lot of money, the secondary market or the possibility to transfer the licence can be usefull. Hovewer if the price of the license does not exceeed let's say $50, it does not make any sense.

There's not a lot you can do about people being suckers.  Used game stores are like used car dealers, they're going to make the money off the transaction.  When the buyer is the one benefiting from the trade, you're losing very little, if anything.

It's not so much the five bucks off as it is the five bucks the guy that traded in his used game made to start with.  If you went off ebay, you'd have most of the buyers costs in profit yourself, ready to reinvest in another title.  When you go through eb games or such, you get reamed about as well as you do when you trade in a car for two grand and the dealer sells it to someone else for eight.

If the game store paid the trader 30 bucks and sold it for 35, then yeah, Stardock loses that $40 sale, but there's $30 out there that likely went towards another purchase.  It just depends on how big of a moron the actors are.  If you sell a week old game for five bucks and the store sells it for five bucks under asking, you're a fucking idiot.

This thread is about games, however my response was about "software". Yes, software is goods, however you pay for the right to use it.  Games are relatively cheap. And what I wanted to say: if the software cost you let's say $619.95 (the price of Autodesk Maya), it really does make sense to be able to transfer the licence. And the reseller does know, that if you dont't have the right to transfer the licence, a lot of customers would never buy it. The reseller has some other choices to make profit on you - e.g. paid support.

However games are something different. If the customer buys it, it is the end of the profit for the reseller.  If you play it or not is no difference for him. Secondary market of games is the transfer of money, but for the reseller it is no profit. If the second gamer buys the game it is the profit.

I don't know how it is in the USA, but in my country if you buy some software but you don't agree with licence conditions, you may return it back (in 14 days since delivery) and you get full return. It is the law. However if you use it, you may not return it anymore (if it does not work, you may reclaim it, it is something else). If you don't read the licence conditions, it is your problem.

There has been a secondary market for intellectual property as long as it has existed - libraries have been around for thousands of years and authors, like software developers, only get paid when a copy of their work is sold - not each time it is read!

The distinction raised in this thread is that software has an ongoing support burden while movies/music/books do not. I accept that a software company might need to charge a license transfer fee to offset this burden but I don't think the marketplace will accept non-transferrable licenses for something that costs $50.00, $100.00 or more. For most of us, that still represents a lot of money. If you have made a mistake and purchased something you aren't going to use, you want to recover as much of your investment as possible by reselling the product - is there anyone on this board who hasn't bought or sold something at a flea market or online at Kijiji or eBay?

Digital disrtibution is a double edge sword for developers. On the one hand, consumers can easily make exact copies of your product for re-distribution. On the other hand, you have direct access to 1.5 billion potential customers (probably more by now) through the Internet - no mddlemen who want a cut of the action, no cost of goods sold, negligible distribution cost, as close to 100% margin as we're ever likely to get! I don't know what the winning business model will be but suspect it will include product placement so some revenue comes from advertisers. I'm sure many schemes will be tried over the next few years and another billion potential customers will be added to the Internet community over the same period of time.

JMiddleton said:

Well, this isn't strictly accurate. There are still middlemen involved in this process in the form of the online store/platform provider, of which there are a much smaller number than that of software developers (I can think of Stardock, Valve, EA, Atari, ign, and maybe one or two more).

WarlokLord said:

That tends to depend on your point of view. The way I see it, when I buy a boxed game, I'm getting the contents of the box. When someone resells a boxed game, the secondary user is (if the seller is honest) also getting the same thing. As a secondary user, you won't have the same rights and privileges for updates as the primary user, if she or he bothered to register the product online (well, this is a requirement for Stardock products, because registration is mandatory for boxed products and grants the primary user the same re-download privileges as a digital-copy purchaser).

When you buy a digitally-distributed game, what you're getting tends to vary based on the policies of the store/sales platform. You may be getting a one-time download, the right to re-download a set number of times, the right to download an infinite number of times, et cetera. The benefit of multiple downloads only comes at the cost having to register yourself as a legitimate user; in a very real sense, this appears to make the concept of a secondary market in digitally-distributed products absurd on its face.