Legal Niches

New Service to Offer Digital Trade-Ins

By pete_gallagher

Green Man Gaming is prepping its brand new digital distribution service for games that will feature a fresh twist—users will be able to trade-in previously purchased and downloaded games for credit.

The London-based firm is expecting to launch its service sometime in the first quarter of this year with some 400 available titles. More than 2,000 games should be available by years-end. Green Man Gaming also promises to 'pay significant royalties to the publisher each time the game is traded in perpetuity.'

COO Gian Luzio added:

Previously the minute you had paid and downloaded your game it had no resale value. This is extremely expensive for the gamer and does not encourage the consumer to try new genres or franchises. Our leading edge technology gives downloaded games a value that gamers can trade-in at any time.

GP: Details are scarce and the website is still under construction, but popular conjecture is that the service will offer a user credits once a game is deleted off their PC, which wouldn't make it exactly a trade-in service. Still, if this is how it works, it's at least a little improvement over what is offered now by other digital delivery systems. We have a couple questions in to the company for further details and will update this story if they respond.

Update: That's why they call it conjecture. A Green Man Gaming rep emailed us back to confirm that traded-in games will be resold as 'used' games.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on January 21, 2010 (boomark / email).