There’s nothing intrinsically unethical about buying and selling used goods, and all buying and selling as a business needs to turn some profit.
There is absolutely a TON unethical with how Gamestop’s model went about it. From their iron grip on shelf space to their aggressive pushing of preordering to avoid having to keep any stock whatsoever to their pricing structure and targeting of kids and students in a space where reselling of this particular type of used goods was not easily handled online and as a result had next to zero upwards pressure on price.
This argument superficially makes sense in a world of used game sales as fundamentally a collector’s business mediated by online logistics companies for door-to-door sales, but that wasn’t Gamestop’s world. Gamestop existed in a world where they controlled both the first sale and all subsequent resales after having driven a bunch of smaller businesses to residual status by leveraging all the used sales money into a competitive advantage against both them and game publishers.
It sucked. It was an entirely parasytic model designed to syphon money away from everybody involved by virtue of controlling real estate. Their demise is one of very few silver linings in the world of “you own nothing” digital distribution.
There’s nothing intrinsically unethical about buying and selling used goods, and all buying and selling as a business needs to turn some profit.
There is absolutely a TON unethical with how Gamestop’s model went about it. From their iron grip on shelf space to their aggressive pushing of preordering to avoid having to keep any stock whatsoever to their pricing structure and targeting of kids and students in a space where reselling of this particular type of used goods was not easily handled online and as a result had next to zero upwards pressure on price.
This argument superficially makes sense in a world of used game sales as fundamentally a collector’s business mediated by online logistics companies for door-to-door sales, but that wasn’t Gamestop’s world. Gamestop existed in a world where they controlled both the first sale and all subsequent resales after having driven a bunch of smaller businesses to residual status by leveraging all the used sales money into a competitive advantage against both them and game publishers.
It sucked. It was an entirely parasytic model designed to syphon money away from everybody involved by virtue of controlling real estate. Their demise is one of very few silver linings in the world of “you own nothing” digital distribution.