Red Irish
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- Mar 6, 2009
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Originally posted by: ShawnD1
This is at least partially correct. Publishers care a lot about second hand sales. I would go as far as saying they care about this more than piracy because there's a measurable value of how much money is being made/lost by second hand sales.Originally posted by: Red Irish
The reason publisher's use DRM is because they want to prevent second-hand sales and herd us all on to consoles.
As someone who has worked for a gaming store, I'll explain a bit of this. Stores don't actually make any money on most gaming related things. PC, Xbox, and PS3 games are all sold at cost. When a customer pays $60 for a game, the store paid $55 for that game. The consoles themselves are also sold at cost. The cheapest Xbox 360 is $200, and the computer would say that the store also paid $200 for it. Things like Xbox controllers, memory cards, and hard drives are also sold at cost. The way places like EB Games make money is through warranties and second hand sales. If you want to know how much second hand sales are worth, just look at what Gamestop is up to
http://www.google.com/finance?q=gamestop
This is also the reason EB Games and Gamestop don't sell many PC games. If they're not making money on the first sale and they can't make money on the second sale, why would they care about PC gamers? They don't, so they don't carry many PC games.
It's ironic how that worked out. By trying to stop second hand sales, it completely alienates the people who rely on second hand sales, so those companies no longer stock PC games. When a multi-billion dollar company like Gamestop no longer stocks PC games, the sales numbers go way down, and the publisher blames piracy.
The nail, on the head.