Secondary Market for Game Licenses to Launch; Steam to Become Crowded, Peddler-Ridden Bazaar

A UK company named Green Man Games  is planning to launch a market for buying and selling used licenses for downloadable video game titles. One small problem — if publishers haven’t been convinced by decades of piracy to loosen their grip on legacy titles, who’s going to convince them now?

This service, which will allow users to resell old game activation codes and dole out a share of the profits to the original publisher, will presumably benefit games with a long shelf life, games that — like the Orange Box, and, not really much else, maybe? — are still being bought at something approaching full price years later. As anyone who has spent time in or around the industry knows, however, 95% of games published actually lose money.

The most obvious pitch to companies as to why they should enable users to resell their download rights (and somewhere right now, Lawrence Lessig is having a violent fit at the very concept) is that it represents a cheap alternative for users who would otherwise pirate their titles. But as anyone who has been on a torrent site knows, games typically peak in popularity immediately after launch — or even before their launch — and decline soon after that.

So: Green Man’s goals are noble, but the execution looks near-impossible. That is, unless the company allows users to set bid-ask spreads and thus encourages the development of a robust market in arbitrage on old copies of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout 2, which would be much, much more fun than, say, manipulating the American political discourse through Intrade.