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The story
Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is making waves on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board after it emerged that the PS5 physical edition’s used trade-in price on release day had dropped to roughly a quarter of the usual amount (6,000 yen). The thread is split between two theories: one holds that the opening of a pirate-game store around the same time pushed more people to resell their copies, while the other is structural — the disc contains only the base game, and since stores can’t verify whether the paper DLC code has already been redeemed, they buy it back as if it were the “vanilla” (non-Dark Arisen) version. The discussion also touches on how the Switch 2 version behaves differently, since it uses a key-card system.
What people said
It literally did, though!
Ah… I see, so that's it…
I see
So the ones trading it in are the criminals who pirated it…
So does that mean even the people who preordered the physical copy thought, 'Alright, better sell it now while I can and pirate it!'?
Oh, I figured this was about the vanilla version
You can feel superior about anything that has value, can't you?
They're just mocking the pirate-console crowd (consoles modded for piracy) whose value crashes to under a third on release day
But you're plenty smug about flexing high PS5 Pro scalper prices, aren't you?
So it's probably a headache for them when people keep bringing these in to sell
That actually seems pretty plausible
Yep
The disc has the base game, the paper slip has the DLC
That's why it's treated as the vanilla edition on the used market
So that's why they buy it back as just plain Dragon's Dogma 2 — yeah, that is pretty scary when you think about it
I guess they can't exactly just take an empty case
– Only the PS5 version has a low Metascore
– Only the PS5 version has a low trade-in price
How did this happen?
Sounds like the PS5 version has freezing issues
Maybe people are rebuying because they're sick of the freezes?
Seems the same as the PS version, but even if everything's downloaded via key card, surely Dark Arisen can only be redeemed once and can't be re-downloaded on a different console, right?
Given this trade-in price, the Switch 2 version must be an all-in-one package
If that's the case, it feels like you'd end up in a weird situation where only the Switch 2 version lets you resell Dark Arisen
Basically, that would mean you could sell or lend out the DLC
That's exactly the weird situation — it's Switch 2 only
'Add-on' is probably a more accurate word than 'DLC' here
Even though it's a key disc?
The base Dragon's Dogma game is on the disc, you know
It makes zero sense that they're putting this out as a physical 'Dark Arisen' package, Capcom (here mockingly called 'Capunko')
It's 6,000 yen, so that's a quarter, not half
There's no way it's 3,000 yen…
Matsuyama said it was 80GB
I guess the point is that the store buying it back has no way of knowing whether the serial code's been used
And they can't exactly boot up the 'Trash Station' (a derisive nickname for the PS5) and try entering it, can they
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In recent years, even big-budget console titles have increasingly shipped with only the main game on the disc, due to disc capacity limits, while extra content is handed out via a paper serial code included in the case. On the used-game market there’s no mechanical way for a store to check whether such a code has already been redeemed, so stores play it safe and buy the game back at a price equivalent to the “base game only” (no DLC) — which is why, even though the package says ‘Dark Arisen,’ the trade-in value tends to drop sharply. In the thread, two theories circulate without a clear resolution: a demand-side theory that the opening of a pirate-game store around the same time pushed more people to resell their copies, and a structural theory that the drop simply reflects stores pricing around the unverifiable DLC code. It’s also worth noting that the Switch 2 version uses a key-card system that requires downloading content each time, so even though it also involves a ‘paper code’ of sorts, the circumstances differ and shouldn’t be equated with what’s happening on PS5 — a point readers can easily get confused about.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen’s PS5 Trade-In Price Gets Cut in Half on Release Day lol”.
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