Ka-pi96 said:
Well yeah, it could be good for publishers, but for Sony and Microsoft, well they don`t pay the packaging costs or anything anyway so that wouldn`t really make any difference.
Anyways, based on this chart and assuming what Sony/MS get for a digital sale is the same as what a retailer would get plus their usual platform royalty, or $22 then that`s the absolute maximum that they could offer as an exchange price without losing money every time someone does this. Even then they could still be losing money if they were to spend that on a less than full price game. Let`s say they only gave $10, less than half of the maximum, if people were to do that each time they bought/sold a full price game then Sony would still be making $12 per game. If they were to buy a discounted (or indie) game for say $20 though then Sony/MS`s share of that would be around $7.33 (based on the percentages used in the chart above), considering the $10 they initially gave out they`d be taking a loss of $2.67 per game bought/sold at that price.
So apart from taking a risk that every game exchanged could end up as a net loss to them, they`d also be seeing the majority of the benefit of any such system (ie. increased digital sales) go to publishers rather than themselves.
If it were publishers paying money back from these exchanges (even if they shared the burden with Sony/MS) it would be even worse for them since unlike Sony there is no guarantee that they`d get any money from a new sale (regardless of whether it was enough to cover the exchange payout) since people could spend the money on a game from a different publisher instead.
So while such a system could benefit either Sony/MS or 3rd party publishers, the other party is likely going to see only negatives rather than positives to it thus making it seem unlikely.
Of course a publisher exclusive exchange such as `exchange your licence for x Ubisoft game to get $10 off of a new Ubisoft game` could work, but a universal system seems like it would have more problems than it would benefits.
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Which is why I chose the 1/4 value of what you paid/current value, whichever is less. Of a $60 game, $22 is just over a third. Maybe a 5th then... I really don't think 3rd parties would have an issue with this, as they have big issues with people going into stores like CEX or Game, exchanging a game and buying another used game instead, absolutely no money goes to them at all, just the game store, while this process allows sales to be done in the controlled environment of the PS/XB stores where all sales are new all the time.
It's no real loss of income than just a sale being put on a game. Overwatch is currently £55 from the store, a few weeks back it was £35. Who's losing the £20? No one because it's still a new copy sold.
I understand the concern though, it's a hard system to fine tune, so to speak. But it beats complete refunds which the stores seem unlikely to do and even then, Steams refund is done on time, this won't be.
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