Near the start of 2010, The NPD Group revealed that total industry sales in 2009 came in at $20.2 billion (including PC retail). The used games market has been doing gangbusters for leading retailer GameStop, and that's resulted in more publishers (led by EA) pushing paid online passes for those consumers who buy used. But how much is the used games market worth? According to a new infographic put together by JJGames, the used business is currently about $2 billion, or a tenth of new game sales.
Additionally, 47.3 million people a year buy used games, and the average used game price is $20, compared to an average new game price of $43.83. We also see that GameStop's margins on used games are far, far better than new (45% vs. 25%). Check out the infographic below for more.
3 Comments
July 21, 2010
So this chart basically illustrates what we already believed. GameStop makes a lot of their money off of used games. It also shows Publishers and Developers are overly complaining. Of course the used market is going to make some money But we're talking a $2B vs. $22B dollar difference. Showing that all the complaining is simply greed from people who view gamers as dollar signs and just want a piece of a pie they are not entitled to. If people want to sell their property that's their business. Developers and Publishers need to keep their eye on their Job, their business and stop being envious and jealous of how much GameStop is making. Your options as I see it are...
1. Deal With It
2. Stop Making Games
3. Enter the Used game market yourself
4. Sell your games for cheaper; at $20-40 to steal away used game purchases from GameStop
Companies are not our families. We are not required to support you. As consumers our job is to buy a good product that is useful to us at a price we want to pay. Your job is to make enticing products and support them.
If you want gamers to care about your business and actually believe you care about them then you have to show them that. You can start by changing your unfair TOS's and EULA agreements. Then you can try things like not releasing games that aren't finished. That have a lot of bugs. Try getting proper feedback from the masses long before any release instead of unnecessary secrecy. Price mediocre looking and playing games (which you know have small budgets) appropriately. You could also try being more Creative. With so many possibilities why do so many games basically do the same things? Try something out of the box more often. Try more genres. Can you get a decent platformer besides Ratchet & mario? That's not a download only low budget title? You know what also attracts people? Features. For instance I'd love to be able to have all the profanity censored in my games. There are others who'd love to be able to turn off blood and gore (like geow). Character Creator. You underestimate peoples desire to create characters or mainly create themselves in put themselves inside of various game worlds. I'd love to beat a game on hard and then unlock a feature that allows me to create a character or two that I could replace as a skin in a shooter offline and Online. Then there's things like Music integration. People are buying a lot of Mp3's and would like to substitute them for the soundtrack (offline or online). I'm sure there are bunch of other things you could do that I can't remember or that other folks could come up with ideas for. Things like Uncharted 2 (and i'm sure other games) did with extra skins and allowing to unlock and use any gun at any time during your re-play of the game. I'm not saying it means a guaranteed hit but it's things that would at least catch people's attention.
Anyway I'm rambling and off topic. I'm surprised Amazon.com didn't chart. Maybe they're included in other retailer.
July 22, 2010
A good summary of public data. I would be curious how JJGames pieced together the middle red bar graph "Mommy, where do used games come from?" I want to take it at face value, but need to better understand the methodology behind it.
July 22, 2010
That chart's retarded. It's hard to take information serious when it's presented like that. "Mommy, where do used games come from?" Not funny. Trying too hard. Oh, and I agree with Blaiyan.