Others get a mix of new and old titles in order to maximize the use of their revenue

Nov 7, 2011 18:41 GMT  ·  By

The market research firm Newzoo has launched a new study which shows that more than half of the people who are playing video games in the United States are not willing to spend any actual money on the titles that they like and they instead rely on trading to get access to them.

The study says that there are 82 million gamers in the United States and that 56 percent of them regularly play the trading game, bringing in their old purchases in order to get the credit they need to get new titles and then repeating this process.

Of the 44% that actually make game purchases more than 85 percent are saying that they are also interested in pre-owned games and regularly get them instead of new releases.

Newzoo also says that around 23% of the game buying group is spending around 23 percent of its budget on games from the second hand market.

The firm also says that 12% of the money spent on video game in the United States is used to get downloadable content, which means that the overall value of the market will go over 960 million dollars (694 million Euro) before the end of 2011.

The research outfit also says that the value of DLC for the European and United States market will go over 1.7 billion dollars (1.23 billion Euro) during the same period.

The figures from the Nerwzoo study should be pretty worrying for both developers and publishers, who have long complained that those games that move, sometimes multiple times, through the second hand market earn them no revenue and often lead to lower than expected sales for new content.

Publishers like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and THQ have introduced versions of the Ten Dollar Project, aiming to make some content unavailable for those who get used game copies in order to make new purchases more interesting.