Braben calls for action against pre-owned sales
"This is essentially rental, and it's not tolerated by other industries," says Frontier boss
David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments, has spoken out against retailers' pre-owned sales practices, during his talk at the Develop conference in Brighton.
Speaking at the event about the generally positive view of the games industry and its future, Braben showed a picture of a GameStation window completely occupied by pre-owned titles, which he said was an issue the industry had to face.
"More than half their floor area is dedicated to pre-owned and that is something as an industry we don't see... those same retailers are only carrying new copies of games from the past few months – if it's a game that's been out for two months and you want to buy one from a shop not Amazon and you don't want pre-owned, it's very hard," he explained.
"This is essentially rental, and it's not tolerated by other industries... Why can we not introduce special 'for rental' copies?"
Braben went on to say that developers and publishers could do more from their end to limit and control the trade of pre-owned games.
"We can make pre-owned detectable, we can put a code on the disc or the packaging... We should be doing something and it should result, in the longer term, in cheaper retail prices, which helps us all."