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Posts Tagged ‘Green Man’

Green Man Gaming will use SecuROM on distributed games

March 30th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

I wrote an article about Green Man Gaming, a new digital retailer of both new and pre-owned games, last year. The service sounded promising, but I noted that a lot of the details still weren’t known. Today, Green Man made an announcement that answers one of the remaining questions.

Today, they have announced an agreement with Sony DADC that will see that firm’s SecuROM DRM system used on the distribution of titles sold on Green Man when it launches next month.

"This partnership dramatically accelerates our initial offer to include the majority of AAA PC titles that are currently available," added Green Man’s CEO Paul Sulyok.

That quote makes me suspect that the big publishers were reluctant to sign on unless some sort of DRM protection was in place.

Green Man is also planning to allow used sales of digital purchases from their store, with the customer selling it back to them for discounts and that key being offered for less to other gamers. Since SecuROM tends to work in part by tying a specific serial key to a user’s computer, I’m interested to see how that system will prove workable with second hand sales.

Posted in Games

Tags: Green Man, SecuROM

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Green Man Gaming – Promises to Allow Trading of Digital Purchases

January 20th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

Currently, that’s all you will find on their website as it’s under construction.

However, a few details were released on Shacknews regarding how this new entrant to the digital retail universe will operate when it goes live sometime in 2010’s first financial quarter (as it’s currently scheduled to).

London-based digital games retailer, Green Man Gaming, has announced a brand new retail platform that will allow PC gamers to trade in games that they’ve purchased and downloaded digitally. Up to now this has only been possible for purchasers of physical media.

“Previously the minute you had paid and downloaded your game it had no resale value,” said Green Man Gaming COO Gian Luzio. “This is extremely expensive for the gamer and does not encourage the consumer to try new genres or franchises.” The new distribution platform will reportedly assign a monetary value to each digitally purchased game, which gamers will be able to trade-in whenever they wish.

Despite what one would might assume, Green Man Gaming seems committed to making sure that the publishing community will get a significant chunk of profit from the digitally traded games. “We will pay significant royalties to the publisher each time the game is traded in perpetuity,” confirmed Luzio. Of course, with digitally distributed media, traditional problems with trade-ins like physical wear-and-tear are nonexistent, allowing all digital trade-ins to be resold as new.

Of course, few of the important considerations for this digital retailer are known yet. For example…regional restrictions, especially for a company based in England. And beyond that, what sorts of games they will have available. Are we talking about major AA type titles, indie games, casual games, or something else?

Still, worth keeping an eye on. Green Man Gaming claims that it will feature a library of at least 400 games at launch, and over 2000 by the end of the year.