Really? Is this real? Is this real life?  I seriously had trouble believing this news story to be real, but you did read that title correctly: digital trade-ins.  Games that you pay to download over the internet, can now be turned around and sold to someone else, with you getting a little piece of that action back towards the next game.  I thought this article was from The Onion Network for a second (fake satirical news), but turns out this shit just got real.

Green Man Gaming is set to roll out a new distribution service that will allow gamers to buy games and then trade them in for credit.  The London based firm is set to roll out the service sometime in the coming months (they mention a first quarter release date) with over 400 games ready to download and trade back in over and over.  Later in the year their goal is to constantly add titles to the list of downloads and have it grow to over 2,000 by the end of 2010.  Green Man Gaming also concludes that they promise to “pay significant royalties to the publisher each time the game is traded in.”

The COO of Green Man Gaming Gian Luzio had this to say:

“Previously the minute you had paid and downloaded your game it had no resale value. This is extremely expensive for the gamer and does not encourage the consumer to try new genres or franchises. Our leading edge technology gives downloaded games a value that gamers can trade-in at any time.”

How is this not a hoax people?  To really try and get peoples’ money for buying a “used” install of a game?  Last time I checked, an install is an install is an install?  They are the same over and over again.  The only way one might get messed up is if the CD-ROM is scratched corrupting an essential file, but this doesn’t even have that!

This all essentially sounds like what goes on at companies all across the world with their IT software.  The company pays a crapton of money to get unlimited licenses for software like Microsoft Works, Outlook, etc. that they need, and then issue out the software to all of the lower minions and workers who need it.  The company has the ability to install the programs as an image on as many computers as possible.  Only with Green Man Gaming, they are buying the licenses and getting their money back (and a shit-ton more).  My guess is that  everyone can’t be GameStop, but they can sure try to be with these digital trad-in downloads.  I really see this company trying to be the ant (Green Man Gaming) that jumps on the gorilla’s back (GameStop) in order to get some used game revenue.

What do you think about this Loot Ninja gamers? Is this worthwhile? Would you use something like this?

[via GamePolitics.com]