Say you bought a physical copy of a game but never got around to playing it because you didn’t have the time, you forgot, or heard such bad reviews that you couldn’t even be bothered to take it out of its shrink wrap, the box, and its case. So you decide that maybe the best thing to do would be to sell it off, sounds simple enough, right?Unfortunately just recently, an individual was threatened with a legal notice for attempting to sell their copy of Bethesda’s The Evil Within 2 on Amazon’s Marketplace. Apparently the legal eagles took offense to the seller calling their copy of the game “new”, which apparently was considered as “unlawful”. The folks at Eurogamer decided to clarify that by speaking to Pete Hines at QuakeCon 2018 who tried to clear up the issue.
According to Hines, “He’s not trying to sell a secondhand game, he’s trying to sell a new game. He was listing the product as if it was new. All we’re saying is if it’s a previously owned product, you have to sell it as a previously owned product – you cannot represent it’s new because we have no way to verify what you’re selling actually is new.”
He adds, “You could have opened it up, played it for five hours, taken whatever inserts or stuff was in there, put it back in shrink wrap and said, ‘Hey this is new.’ It’s not new – you owned it, you bought it, so just list it as a used title. That’s it, that’s the end of the argument.” Hines also clarified that the company has no problems with people selling their used games. However the issue here was that because the listing was described as it being a “new” game, it might confuse other customers who might think that it would the equivalent of buying a game from a retailer.