Industry veteran David Braben just recently said the used game market is to blame for keeping retail game costs high and now, another gaming vet echoes that sentiment.
This time it's Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack, who told GI International that pre-owned games are a severe threat to the industry. In fact, he says if things continue the way they are, "there's not going to be an industry."
"If used games continue the way that they are, it's going to cannibalize, there's not going to be an industry. People won't make those kinds of games. So I think that's inflated the price of games, and I think that prices would have come down if there was a longer tail, but there isn't."
Dyack added that there's "no tail" to a game, in that a publisher and developer ca't keep making money, as the used copies of that title take the place of new ones and subsequently, the game makers lose out.
"Now there is no tail. Literally, you will get most of your sales within three months of launch, which has created this really unhealthy extreme where you have to sell it really fast and then you have to do anything else to get money."
Considering such statements, it's probably no surprise that current rumors say the next PlayStation and Xbox won't support used games . If it's really this dangerous – and it appears to be, given the slumping state of the industry – maybe it's long past time to ditch the pre-owned idea before the "cannibalization" goes too far.
