Green Man Gaming – Probably not very good
I have severe doubts about the idea of digital trade-ins as proposed by Green Man Gaming. After the embarrassing failure to start after the countdown simply froze three days before it was supposed to launch, it is now open for custom.
Part of why trade-ins work in the real world is that there is free market economies going on. If I buy a game from HMV, and then want to trade it in at Gamestation, I am free to do so (so long as Gamestation stay in business that is).
Green Man Gaming is broken because in their fictitious economy you cannot trade in games bought elsewhere, you can only trade in their games back to them, and you don’t get money back, you get credit. Whether that credit is any good to you is largely determined by how much money you want to spend there. I’d be pretty annoyed if I had a shedload of money invested in Green Man Gaming and then they stopped having decent special offers, whilst I look at the other DD outlets with their frequent excellent promotions. Unless they promise to have a library as broad as the other outlets, and match them on price, there will be situations where you are worse off having chosen to give Green Man Gaming your money. There’s also no information available about how they calculate trade in values. Is it going to be 90% of sale price? 50% 2%?
Still, there is no reason not to capitalise on their crazy low introductory offers. A bunch of games for 1p.
Uplink
Darwinia
NecroVisioN: Lost Company
World of Goo
High School Dreams
However, this is a pretty great example of how it won’t work in the long run. In a few months time, what is the trade in price of these games going to be? The sale price will be back up to RRP, so surely I should get a trade-in price that reflects that?
It is pretty insulting to ask people to invest into a system when they can’t even fully explain it to customers. Hit “support” button, and you’ll simply be told “No topics found”.
I’d avoid it to be honest, but I will keep an eye on it for good offers too.
Heh. When they go down in a few months, they’ll probably be going: “It’s piracy wot did it.”
I was going to grab Darwinia and Uplink, but then realised there was no basket (unless I missed it) and it “reserved” my fictional “key” during checkout for 15 minutes…
Well, apparently it did anyway, I only stayed for 2 minutes as my brain went “meh” and I couldn’t be bothered to go through 2 checkouts of 1p each…
I might give Necrovison a spin its only a penny after all.
Remind me again the value of trade-ins you’re offered from, say, Steam?
What’s the DRM on these games? I’d like to try Darwinia and Necrovision, but I’m a bit wary.
It’s securom 🙁
I’m sceptical about Lewie’s impartiality here – I thought he was supposed to be finding bargains, not telling people where to buy from on some personal level!?!?
Licence Keys are as viable a product as cars, bananas or elephants and a trade-in system is a logical way to build loyalty with your customers (and arguably as less intrusive one than cramming your ‘Steamworks’/G4WL into games people didn’t even buy from you!)
If you pay 1p for a game and get no trade-in it’s hardly the end of the world – if they choose to give you SOME trade-in as a ‘loyal first customer’ that’s even better.
I think Lewie needs to spend more time promoting bargains and less his political or personal opinions (more Savy – less Preachy!) 🙂
Great to see you giving an interesting new idea a chance and helping to support competition in the download market there Lewie.
A lesser person would just condemn the whole concept out of hand with no real evidence to do so.