NY Times on gaming’s slow season
On the eve of Electronic Arts’ quarterly report to Wall Street, the Times highlights the 360 shortage and the rise of used game sales.
FULL STORY:
The New York Times focuses on the problems facing the gaming industry today, using EA’s impending quarterly report, which the publisher has already said will miss estimates, as its peg to current events. The article delves into two problems that hit console publishers hard during the holiday season: the shortage of Xbox 360s and the popularity of used game sales.
We know that there weren’t enough Xbox 360s out there to propel EA and Activision to their goals for the quarter, which is always the industry’s biggest of the year. Not enough systems, not enough games sold. The article also explains how Gamestop, which has cornered the market on trade-in games, has hit publishers hard. Actually, how hard it hits depends on who you ask.
“The used games business does not cannibalize sales of newer video games,” Daniel A. DeMatteo, GameStop’s vice chairman and chief operating officer, said in an interview. “As a matter of fact, it does somewhat the opposite. We continuously increase the market for new games by allowing customers to trade in games that they are no longer playing. The used games business puts currency in people’s hands.”
Take Two chimes in at the end of the story with a lighthearted (but obviously true) dissent.
“We would prefer that retailers only sold new games,” he said, “but we’ve learned to make peace with it.”
Meanwhile, there have been rumors kicking around that the PS3 would somehow detect resold games and not play them. How exactly they plan to accomplish this, we’re not sure, but it seems like artificially closing such a huge market (Gamestop could make $1 billion in used game sales this year) is the wrong way to go.
