For those of you who trade in games, it's not your fault, but devs lose money every time someone purchases a used game rather than a new title. It's just a fact of life that when people provide any service that someone will always lose out sometime, but a new service called PostalGamer has started up a little something to help both gamers and developers out.

The creators of the site originally started with GameGavel a great trading and auction site, a few years ago and when they say the problem developers had with used game trade ins, they found a great idea and have clearly decided to make a profit and hopefully a change in the industry.

The way Postal Gamer would work is customers will post their used games to the company in pre-paid envelopes, and the value of said game would be turned into credit for PostalGamer's marketplace. But what do the devs get? Well, PostalGamer is promising to pay 30 per cent more for used games than "the corner retail store". In addition, it will pay the publisher 10 per cent of the revenue generated by their games. The cost would equate as such, say you bought Dead Island for $US60 and then traded it in for $50 (say you finished it or was somehow, bored by it in a few days) and then $5 would go to the devs, whilst you would be able to pick up Arkham City. with a bit of a discount the next month.

Postal Gamer has been honest with their position saying, "While used games have historically been a 'negative' to publishers, our model turns them into a 'positive'” Despite my previous comments on Digital Distribution, PostalGamer's side of things seems interesting to say the least, "We want to see physical game media continue to thrive, but the current state of used game retail is seriously doing its part to re-route publishers into new digital dimensions to curtail and abolish used game sales as we know it."

PostalGamer will make a fairly significant impact with a hope of making a revenue of half a billion in the next 5 years as well as sharing sales data with publishers, allowing them to get a clearer picture of, "a game's popularity after it leaves the retail shelves." I'd love to see what would be sold and popular even years after they've disappeared off shelves, imagine a good series of Goldeneye 64's topping the chart.

Postal Gamer is in talks with "several publishers" and with each participant receiving a seat on an "Advisory Board" that allows them to supervise the development of the service. I can't wait to see how this turns out.

Via [GamesIndustry.Biz]

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