Hope this isn’t going away any time soon

A rumor has been moving around the mill lately that the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony apparently won’t support any used games at all. Of course, this is just a rumor since a lot of details about the consoles themselves are little to non-existent, but this hasn’t kept the CEO of GameStop Paul Raines from being asked about this hot rumor in an interview he had with Gamespot about his company.

When Gamespot asked Raines how he felt about the rumor he replied, “Well, they’re rumors. I guess we’ve said we don’t think it makes business sense. The $1.2 billion trade credits are funding growth of the industry. If you look at our PowerUp Rewards community, just in the United States, not including Europe, Australia, and Canada, there’s 24 million consoles in people’s homes. That 24 million consoles at current trade prices is about $1.8 billion of trade credits that we can use to drive the launch of Wii U, PS4, and Xbox next. So our console makers know that and they don’t want to miss the opportunity to use that to drive the market. And it doesn’t make economic sense. It’s a consumer problem. There are a lot of people who love pre-owned games. But if it were to happen, it’s like anything else in the business. You react accordingly. The preowned business will not go away any time soon. Even if new consoles don’t play preowned games, people are going to be playing PS3 games, and we still have a ton of people playing PS2. That’s a huge part of our pre-owned business.”

The rumor is just that, a rumor. Then again, you’ll notice the trend lately with some companies trying to combat used game sales with online passes. So one might think this rumor may have a similar outcome to what it suggests now or a more less severe version of it. I agree with Raines on this one as disallowing (a.k.a blocking) used games from being played on the next installment of consoles will be a very big mistake. Not everybody has the money to buy all the $60 games that are out there and those people wait till the games are either lowered in price or try to find it used which is guaranteed to be lower than the original cost. Also if you keep limiting what your customer can do, all you’ll do is drive them away. What do you guys think?

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