Just Add Water’s Stewart Gilray and Dan Morse have told OXM that Microsoft needs to let Xbox Live users trade in games and also give the publishers a cut of profits.
“They have to get something, because retail-wise when you sell a game at 40 quid, you get six or seven quid back, whereas if we sell a game on for 10 quid on digital, we get six or seven quid – so why would we do retail, when we get the same amount of money to do digital? You might get more sales, but you have to spend a sh**load more money for a retail product to pick up as much [revenue],” he said.
“You have to have a minimum 50,000 unit run in each territory, which costs half a million dollars per territory, so if you’re doing a 100,000 units in two territories combined, that’s a million dollars outlay. So you’ve got to sell how many units to make all that back again? And that’s on top of development costs, marketing costs and stuff. To me, in the current climate I just think digital is the way to go.”
Morse also can’t believe Sony, Microsoft and Valve don’t allow people to trade digital games using a marketplace for that.
“The only way I can see anyone preventing preowned sales from working as they do, is creating a marketplace where [players and publishers] can do it themselves. I don’t understand why Valve, Sony and Microsoft don’t have their own marketplace for trading in digital games – you could trade in games and get credit in store.”
“It could be the same as you would have in any shop,” he added. “It seems a no-brainer to me, to create that marketplace. You’d get hammered.”
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