Report: Resale Value Of Popular Online PS3 Games Down Following Network Attack

The average resale prices for the PlayStation 3's most popular online games have declined during the PlayStation Network's downtime, according to reports, suggesting demand for the titles may be down as well. According to a report on independently-run tracking site Video Game Price Charts, a sampling of the ten titles believed to be amongst the most-played online for the system shows that their average second-hand prices dropped 7.4 percent overall between April 20 (the day the outage began) and May 11, when the report was published. Resale prices for the Xbox 360 versions of these games were up slightly on average during the same period. The implication is that the decreased resale value for these titles may indicate not only a reduced demand, but an increased supply of used copies in the marketplace -- in other words, now that the games are no longer functional online, players may be selling or trading their copies more frequently than before. The report is hardly scientific (the titles tracked, for example, are based on their online popularity on the Xbox 360, not the PS3), but it is an interesting look into how the PSN attack may be having a detrimental financial effect on companies beyond Sony and its publishing partners.