Used Game Prices Went Down in 2008

Does anyone need more proof regarding the impact of the world wide economic crisis on the videogames market? Those who do should look no further than the recent data offered by Video Game Price Charts, which is a pricing data site watching the way the so called “gray market” is evolving. Basically, the site is looking at the way the prices for used videogames are moving and it has seen that overall, in 2008, those prices went down by 23.7%. In 2007, the prices for used games also went down but by a much smaller percentage - 11.8%.

The channels tracked by Video Game Price Charts are mostly Western centric, like Amazon, Half.com, eBay and JJGames, so the world wide situation could be pretty different. Still, if the average price of a used game was 12.69 dollars at the beginning of 2008, it went down to 9.68 dollars at the end of the year.

Looking at the month by month evolution of the prices, as posted by Gamasutra, it seems that the second half of 2008 saw the biggest drop. As more blockbuster videogames are launched in November and December, the prices used to rebound, but this year only saw a moderate increase.

As gamers have less and less money to purchase videogames, they are not so eager to pay a lot for games that have already been used by someone else. The effect could be quite clear on sales. As used games are becoming cheaper and with more players getting ready to sell some of their games in order to get new releases, we might see more money moving towards the secondary market, which could result in lower sales of AAA titles when they are released by the big publishers.

This could lead to a backlash aimed at the used games market, which is already blamed by some industry players for diminishing revenue and sales.