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Digital games have a lot of advantages such as instant access, the ability to play on multiple machines, and no threat of a disc or cartridgebreaking rendering the game unplayable. But there is also a number of disadvantages to going digital with one of those being no more game trade-ins and a lack of a used games marketplace.
One individual, known as dave311freak on eBay, seems to have got around the problem of reselling digital games, however. He decided to list his Steam account, along with the 139 games it contained, on eBay. The starting price was just $500 with a “Buy It Now” option of $1000. Surprisingly someone chose the latter, paid the $1000, and got themselves 139 games. The full list of games is available on the eBay item listing and includes most of Steam’s best games at the moment.
Such an auction did require a lot of trust on the buyer’s part though, as they had to rely on the seller changing all the Steam account details over to the new identity once the payment had gone through. Some of the games also required additional login details that needed to be passed across, such as for Dragon Age: Origins and Company of Heroes.
So what was dave311freak’s reason for selling his Steam account?
"I am selling my account because, as you can probably tell, I spend way too much time buying and playing video games and I am going to try to spend more time with my family and doing other hobbies."
Although this is being seen as proof you can sell digital games I think it’s more of an exception than a rule that this works. The guy had to sell his whole account and not just a single game and I don’t know many people who would want to do that.
Digital games are becoming more commonplace and especially so on PC. Developers and publishers clearly like the idea of digital games because there is no used game market, which they don’t make any money from. But consumers and retailers don’t appreciate the fact games cannot be traded in and re-sold. The reception the PSP got with retailers is a clear indication of that.
We may end up with some form of trade-in process for digital games, but that can’t happen as long as we have different services selling games without a common format on PC. For consoles companies like Microsoft and Sony might introduce trade-ins purely for the fact they can make additional profit from the game licenses without a retailer getting involved.
that is a lot of video games.
