The trading market for video games used to make up a sizeable part of the gaming community, one which made publishers furious due to missing out on a share of a pre-owned game selling. Selling your old games was so big in fact that the Xbox One was originally designed to prevent customers from playing pre-owned games, leading to Sony’s iconic video memeing the situation.
This community however hasn’t really translated into the digital age. When games were played via CD/DVD, you would own the license to that game via the disc, and could sell or share it with anyone through the disc. In the digital age where games are downloaded via Steam, selling your license isn’t so simple.
The CD/DVD is now your account that stores the licenses for those games, and sharing it is tied to your email and password, making it a security risk to share or sell. Account sharing is also against Steam’s Subscriber Agreement. There is an option to share your library with your family, however this is limited to up to ten devices and only five people can have games installed at a time.
For this reason, gamers have been asking for a solution to sell their old games that they no longer play and can no longer get a refund on.
Enter Robot Cache: a new digital store that is promising gamers the opportunity to sell their digital games and allow users whose libraries are worth thousands to make back some of that money. The company also promises to fix one of the biggest complaints about reselling developers had, and promises to give developers their deserved share of the resell profit.
Not only does reselling give back to developers, Robot Cache only takes 5 per cent of the revenue from any purchase made through their store, giving more back to developers compared to Steam or Epic as the company believed the traditional 30% split between developer and retailer was unfair, especially to Indie devs.
Robot Cache has just launched in Australia and will be running a free games festival starting on November 29 and ends on December 31. They will be offering three free games you can claim at the Robot Cache store.
The free games on offer this month are:
- Red Faction Guerrilla Remastered
- Agents of Mayhem
- Regions of Ruin
Here’s how the process works: If you decide you are satisfied with the game and don’t intend to play again and you’ve owned that game for at least seven days, you can then list the game for sale on Robot Cache.
Your copy of the game will go into a queue that rotates with each copy of a game sold. Games sold for the first time give 95 per cent to the publisher and 5 per cent to Robot Cache. Games sold for the second time (by a customer) give 70 per cent of the resale value to the publisher, 25 per cent to the gamer, and 5 per cent to Robot Cache.
Because Robot Cache is connected to a blockchain, the platform has its own form of currency called IRON that you can generate while your computer is idling and not playing games. This currency can be used to buy games on the store as well.
The platform allows you to earn IRON, the platform-specific digital currency that you can use to purchase games by sharing your PC’s computing power when idle. This is an optional feature that you can opt in or out of at will.
So far, the platform has been backed by AMD and Ryzen as part of their investment into expanding blockchain technology.
If you’ve been keen to clear out your extensive Steam library, download Robot Cache to get started selling. While you’re there, be sure to pick up some great deals throughout the festival.