Stardock's plan to use Goo to launch a used PC game market

Posted Mar 30th 2009 3:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Biz, Downloads

Last week we reported that Stardock would soon be launching Goo, a new DRM set-up that is less evasive than other systems for PC game copy protection. One of the elements of that system would be for PC gamers to actually sell their Goo-enabled PC games for others to use legally but details on how that would work were lacking.

During GDC last week our sister site Joystiq caught up with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell who gave details on how this new system would work. In a nutshell if you wanted to sell your Goo-enabled PC game you would go to Stardock's online Impulse Marketplace and sell off your license to run the game back to the publisher. A buyer could then get that license from the publisher at a cheaper price versus buying the game "new".

The publisher's advantage is that both transactions are under their control; they set the price for purchasing the "used" PC game license and also set the price for reselling it to someone else and pocket that money for themselves rather than see it go to a game retailer like Gamestop. Goo is set to launch next week and Stardock has said they will announce which publishers will use the system "soon".

Tags: goo, impulse, impulse-marketplace, impulse-reactor, stardock

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

This is an interesting concept, though I'm not in favor of letting the publisher set the prices. It would be better if they charged a fee - such as a percentage of the sale - for facilitating the transfer of the license and let the sellers put whatever price they wanted on the "used" games.

I wonder how long it would take for Steam to implement something like this. They already know which games are assigned to which accounts... how hard would it be to build infrastructure to allow the transfer of licenses?Posted at 4:10PM on Mar 30th 2009 by Xerloq

That sounds really cool, but if it ends up being like Gamestop is for console games (we sell it back for $7 and then turn around and sell it to someone else for $40) then no thanks.
I agree with Xerloq's thinking. Allow us to set a price and the companies get a percentage.Posted at 4:36PM on Mar 30th 2009 by Xeones25

Sounds awesome, and I hope it could work on Steam, one question about it though.

What would be the difference between buying a new and used license, I mean it doesn't make sense to buy a new one now, since these licenses are intangible you can't like get dirt on it or anything and there isn't even a set number of licenses, I mean they can't ever sell out, there infinite, just seems like it's kinda a big flaw in this whole deal.Posted at 5:19PM on Mar 30th 2009 by Alex

So right now, you can actually have a "gift" license in Steam -- I got one because I already owned Half Life 2 when I bought Orange Box. My understanding is that I can just specify a Steam account and the license is "applied" there. If I could pay a small fee -- maybe smaller if the game's current price is cheaper -- to turn a regular license into a gift license, that I could then resell as I wish, I'd be totally into that.Posted at 9:00PM on Mar 30th 2009 by James

Seconding my fellow James' proposal. There are some games that I wish I could gift, but can't as I bought them for myself. Rather than rebuying the same game, it'd be nice if you could Gift Pass a game you already own for a fraction of the original cost.

For example, if a game is 40 bucks, make is so gift passing it costs 10 dollars. If it's 10 bucks, make the gift pass fee 2.50. You get the idea.Posted at 4:40PM on Mar 31st 2009 by James Murff