GAME: Pre-owned charges havent hurt us

The wide-spread efforts by publishers to earn extra money from pre-owned games hasn’t dented GAME’s second-hand game business.

This year EA, Sony and THQ have introduced new measures that mean owners of games like Mass Effect 2, SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3 and UFC Undisputed 2010 must pay for an extra online access code if they bought the game second-hand.

Certainly, publishers are using content to extend the life of games to extend the reasons to keep them – that’s a good thing, as it’s good for us and we’ll sell more of the games,” said GAME CEO Ian Shepherd.

But these ‘second user charges’ haven’t diminished interest in pre-owned games.

No we’ve not seen the changes in the commercial nature of how some games have launched make any impact on the trade-in category. It’s still a strong part of our business.”