Wait…what?
Leading video games retailer Gamestop is looking into the idea of selling digital download games at a discounted rate. They would be marketed as “used” titles.
The retailer makes the bulk of its profit from the used video game market. It’s a pretty lucrative business model – buy someone else’s old game and then resell it to another customer for two to three times the cost.
Gamestop makes much more money on those sales than when it sells new games, which have some of the smallest margins in all of retail.
But of course the store is facing a huge problem with the rise in digital distribution, which makes going out to a store a thing of the past.
Kudos to Gamestop, though, for keeping on top of things, and now it looks like it wants to keep innovating with a seemingly nonsensical idea – selling “used” digital downloads.
In a Gamespot interview, Gamestop CEO Paul Raines said, “There are some technologies out there in Europe, and we’ve looked at a couple that are involved. We’re interested; it’s not a meaningful business yet. Right now we’re not seeing that as a huge market, but I think we’re on the leading edge. There are a few companies, a few startups, out there that we’ve talked to that are doing this.”
It’s still unclear exactly what this would entail, since the entire concept of used games disappears when you talk about digital content. Stay tuned.
