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Mr Khan said: I considered that possibility (knowing that that is how it worked with Comic Books before the late 1980s, where newsstands could just sell unsold copies back to the publishers), but then that would dis-incentivize stores from bargain-binning anything, if they could just dump it back on the publisher. |
There are different ways this could work, depending on distributer practice and retailer options. For example, returned stock is sometimes not returned at all, as the cost of actually physically returning something only to be shipped out again would be horribly inefficient. Instead, a retailer might be credited per copy; kind of like they sent the product back then re-bought it at a lower price, only the product never actually moved from the retailer's storeroom. Usually when this happens, both the retailer and the distributer eat some of the loss in value. I imagine a game would have to be a flop to bear the cost of actually sending physical copies back, as that produces a lot of extra overhead on both ends.
That being said, I've never actually dealt with game returns, only DVD returns, which had tons of incentives and promotions, such as tiered buy-in deals, so what I said above is just speculation.
The big thing with software sales, though, is that, while a retailer doesn't want to run out, they also don't want to overstock. First shipment sales for the retailer are important to the publisher because that means the retailer is going to order more units in the next shipment and so on. Sales that first week are key for everyone.
