Used may be a four letter word among publishers and developers due to the constraints preowned games and a hits-driven market has put on the industry. But despite risk aversion and other drawbacks, have gamers benefitted more than they have lost by the resulting ecosystem that the used game market has created?

Used games are evil. That is the common belief amongst the developers and publishers of the game industry. Retail stores make a huge chunk of profit that the actual game creators don’t get a piece of. And many point to this lost revenue as the reason publishers have been forced to become more hits-driven and more risk averse.

“It’s killing single player games in particular, because they will get preowned, and it means your day one sales are it, making them super high risk,” David Braben, the developer behind Elite and Kinectimals, said in an interview with Gamasutra earlier this year.

The sales data supports Braben. If one examines data on the top ten selling games in the U.S. of each year, supplied by the NPD Group — in particular this generation’s life cycle of 2005 to 2011 — the signs of successful risks are minimal.

Read the full article at Gamasutra.