Ready at Dawn founder Ru Weerasuriya has slammed Gamestop’s business model of pushing used games on most of its customers.
In an interview with Games Industry International, he expressed his disgust at Gamestop for pushing used games over new copies. But unlike other game developers, he doesn’t want used games to disappear. He wants a medium that will be great for consumers and developers as he feels the current model ruins developers.
Here’s what he said:
“I think the problem is right now there are retail outlets that are really taking everybody for a ride. You can’t make a living at the expense of everybody else.
I walked into a GameStop, asked for a new copy of a game and without telling me [the store clerk] tried to slip me a used copy and wanted to sell it to me for $5 less. I flipped out in front of the guy. I was like, ‘Dude, wrong guy… You’re doing this to the wrong guy’… There are developers out there who are making games for [years] and some of them will go down purely because the revenue stream is basically flawed and creating this place where developers don’t see even a little part of it.
I don’t think we should stop used games, but we should do something about getting part of the revenue back from GameStop and places like that. That’s not penalizing consumers; they’ll still get what they want.”
Ready at Dawn is about to release The Order: 1886 exclusively for the PS4 very soon. The PS4 console fully supports used games as does the Xbox One (now). It will be interesting to see what the video game industry comes up with in the future when it comes to developers getting revenue from second hand software sales…
