I disagree. There are all sorts of provisions in both state and federal law that Gamestop and other third party retailers could invoke. Frankly, even Apple has faced and settled litigation from other retailers in relation to its company owned stores. Right or wrong, there are significant legal barriers to a manufacturer or publisher opening their own chain of retail outlets.
Even if this retailer becomes significant enough, I don't think 10% will be enough to satiate publishers.
Selling gaming accessories. Click
Plenty of stores sell their own products, how is it different for a game company? Nintendo already has a store (albeit only one), and Sony did until recently. Namco used to own a large chain of arcades. I'm not sure what Apple litigation you're referring to, but I doubt any of it was for the offense of their mere operation of the Apple Store.
Originally Posted by TheShawn
I'm not aware of any major entertainment company that sells used versions of their own product. The easiest angle for Gamestop to take would be a claim that they are engaged in price and market manipulation or product dumping. Have you ever noticed that the Apple store maintains MSRP at all times and with a few rare exceptions, so too do Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft? I'm not saying it's impossible, but there would likely need to be a lot of restrictions in place to even allow them to operate and frankly, in doing so they would alienate their entire new retail network and essentially kill their new product business where they have a much larger profit margin for a lot less work.
There is no such offense as "market manipulation". There are various offenses related to what we might call market manipulation (e.g. collusion), but you have given no reason to assume that they'd commit any of them. There is also no such thing as "product dumping". There is price dumping, but just because they open a store, doesn't mean they're going to sell their products for less than fair market value.
Originally Posted by TheShawn
But would it be enough for legal precedence? Because that's all it takes to interpret and then change the laws to make stuff like this more common place. First used games, then DVD's, then cars, then recycling aluminum cans....
I think it's more what Bojay1997 mentioned earlier. The publishers get random inconsequential checks from a little game store that they have no way of tracking so simply don't ever cash, while in the meantime the game store gets all the free publicity and SEO google hits from gaming websites discussing it.
"Game programmers are generally lazy individuals. That's right. It's true. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since the dawn of computer games, game programmers have looked for shortcuts to coolness." Kurt Arnlund - Game programmer for Activision, Accolade...
I never said there was. There is a whole body of law at the state and federal and frankly international law designed to prevent market manipulation. If you want specific statutory citations to law and regulations designed to prevent such manipulation, you can easily do so in Google.
I never assumed they would or wouldn't do anything. I can tell you, however, that among the reasons video game manufacturers and publishers don't open their own store chains is the potential litigation that could ensue from anti-trust claims and claims of market manipulation. More importantly, it doesn't make good business sense for them as it undermines the value of their new product and will likely cause a massive backlash from retailers that only sell their products new.
By the way, product dumping is a term used pretty interchangeably with price dumping and as far as I can tell, means the same thing.
http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/adp_e/adp_e.htm
As an update it appears that the start up(EKG) will now share the 10% with both publishers and developers, although they will be splitting the initial amount in half between the two. So still 10% total but 5% will go to publishers and 5% will go to developers.
ALL HAIL THE 1 2 P
Originally Posted by THE 1 2 P
I'm surprised he is able to get any press at all. His Indiegogo crowd funding effort for Gamegavel was a complete disaster. I think he literally only received one pledge for $25 out of the $100K he was looking for.
http://www.indiegogo.com/gamegavel