All the talk around the town lately has been about used games this and used games that. Some preventative measures to curb used game sales by big publishers has come in the form of Online Passes and locked-out content, but that just isn't enough.
Just recently rumors spurred about that the PS4, potentially called Orbis, will have a measure to curb used games, and before that rumors ran rampant about the Xbox 720 not being able to play used games. Well, GameStop's CEO isn't having any of that and thinks it's unlikely either next-gen console will prevent used games from being played.
According to RipTen, GameStop CEO Paul Raines mentioned that “it’s unlikely that there would be that next-gen console because the model simply hasn’t been proven to work.”
The conference call also details that GameStop made a wealthy $2.6 billion last year and that 46% of all their profits came from used game sales. RipTen also goes over the retail facts, showing that up to 70% of first week retail sales and 21% of the entire retail market belongs to GameStop, meaning that there's a huge amount of profit to be lost if publishers decided to go digital only and cut out the retail chains altogether. That's not to mention that not everyone has broadband speeds and caps, fast enough or reliable enough to handle frequent 10+ gigabyte downloads on a regular basis.
On the flipside, developers like Volition and Frontier believe that used games are hurting the industry, and that bigger and better games could be made if more money came back to the developers from used game sales. That seems highly unlikely, especially with comments from Addmired Studios' CEO, Gabriel Leydon, who openly talks about the real reason new games become used games so frequently and it's because of their lacking quality and high prices and not because the second-hand market is some evil beast.
We won't know for sure if Microsoft and Sony will embrace or abandon the second-hand market for their consoles until they officially announce them, until then continue to expect more corporate conjecture and industry speculation.
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