Rasmus Hojengaard, the director of creative development at CryTek, explained his earlier comments on the matter of being pro anti-used game measures after causing quite a stir earlier on.
The used game market is one that has been the subject of many a discussion and the cause for quite a few heated debates among members of the video game community. There is good reason for the topic being taken seriously by all three parties concerned.
First things first, it would be better to acquaint everyone with who the parties are and how they work. Although developers and publishing studios are not exactly the same thing, with the developer making the games and the publisher releasing them, they
are considered one party.
The next party is the retailer, with chains such as GameStop and GAME, the latter incidentally having gone bankrupt earlier in the year, and finally the last party is the gamer.
Used games are basically games that are being sold a second time after being ‘used’ by a player. This is beneficial for both the retailer and the gamer. The gamer gets the game at a lower price and the retailer sees his extra business from the same product.
The publisher though, does not see a single penny from the used game market and has cost a number of studios millions of dollars in revenue.
With that in mind one can understand why Hojengaard moved to clarify his earlier comments when, in a recent interview, the CryTek employee took a moment to state, “My comment made in the interview released on the 24th of April, touching upon ‘blocking
sales of used games’, was not intended to be taken seriously nor representative of the opinion of CryTek.”
As for those what his earlier comments were, well they went something like this, “From a business perspective that (anti-used game measures in next-gen consoles) would be absolutely awesome. It’s weird that (second-hand) is still allowed because it doesn’t
work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well.”
It seems that the debate will rage on for quite some time, or at least until the platform developers actually put in measures to block the use of used games.
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