Retailers Play Harder on Secondhand Sales

   Jill Krasny has written an article for the Street.com which looks into the secondhand video game market. It's a reasonably well-thought-out piece which touches on the used video game market, the drive towards online distribution, and how publishers are coping with extracting revenue from games after the initial sale. I found this quote from Ben Noel odd:

"Ben Noel, executive director of the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy at the University of Central Florida, worked as a vice president at Electronic Arts(ERTS) in the late 90s and early 2000s, a time "video games were just becoming a real market," he says. "There was legislation that worked in the favor of the 'Blockbusters' of the world for leasing products, and then the aftermarket became an issue for the publishers, starting about 10 or 15 years ago," Noel says. "It was tough to negotiate with those specialty stores, but obviously publishers would like to have value in their property that gets resold."

   I guess Ben isn't aware of the billions that Atari and Nintendo made in the 80s and that wasn't a "real market." Nintendo became the juggernaut of the video game industry in the 80s but according to Ben, they didn't do it in a real market. Thanks Ben for your wisdom and I guess if you didn't live through it, it didn't happen.