Best Buy and Target Look To Offer Used Video Game Sales / Trade-Ins

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Guess Best Buy and Target don’t read TFTS. Their loss, of course, but they clearly missed out on our coverage of THQ creative director Cory Ledesma, who announced that buying used games was “cheating the company”. After all, if they knew such a thing, surely they wouldn’t have launched their own venues to sell used games!

Target plans to offer the trade-in service for both games and DVDs at fully 850 stores by the end of the year, and Best Buy has plans to start trades at 600 stores this week, with used games for sale later on. Both will likely only be selling for store credit, and Target’s the likely winner here since games and DVDs will soon be able to be traded, in a roundabout fashion, for food.

But is it really cheating? I say no–in fact, I believe used games help game companies. Consider: if you buy a game used, only one copy of the game is sold. But now, the original owner can buy a second game at a lower cost due to the subsidy of the used game. And if both the new owner and the used owner buy the same amount of downloadable content, they’ve both kicked in cash. If the used owner abstained from buying the game entirely, he would never have bought the DLC. But because he could get a game used, he was available to buy downloads, where if he didn’t buy the game at all because he didn’t want it new, he would never have paid for the download. Meanwhile, the new owner can buy a game that he might not have bought otherwise due to the discount gained from selling a used game, which is a sale that may not have happened without the used game being involved.

Admittedly, it’s not as much profit for the game companies as buying every game new and then retiring it like a flag when it becomes unplayable or uninteresting, but still.