The used games pie

The past few months a lot has been said about the second hand market of games. Some publishers are trying to get a piece of the pie in whatever evil way they can. The games industry is seriously the first and so far the only industry where they try to get money from the used product sales. From a consumers point of view it's absolutely ridiculous. DToid's Jim has some thing to say about it in his jimquisition: the used game solution. He preaches the truth; "make it worth 60 bucks or fuck off!"

there is no arguing that, but i do feel a part of the problem lies deeper. If i look at the problem from the publisher's point of view, "I see people playing on our servers with their used game for free! Outrageous!" It's not exactly like that off course, because the guy who bought the game new could also still be playing online if he not had traded it in. So if they made a proper game in the first place they wouldn't be crying anyway.

The real problem here is pricing. A truly great game deserves to be 60 bucks, and some lesser games not so much. That's the first part of my proposition to make the industry, uhrm.. well... more 'fair'.

The way a price is built up is also wrong. Pachter predicts a paid monthly subscription to MW like games. Which is even more wrong, wrong like pregging your sister wrong. Unless!, unless they start supporting it like a mmorpg off course, chances of that are less then none. What they should do is a monthly fee for online gaming by the console producers, who then provide fast and stable dedicated servers. By adding this cost to the gamers and taking away some work from game studio's, game prices should drop with, somewhere around 5 bucks. I'd gladly pay for online subscription if the price of games would go down a bit. This way Sony and Microsoft have all the multiplayer costs and control, I think that is the way it should be. Following this principle Sony and MS should not allow publishers like EA to come up with an assbackward thing like the online pass. Sony and MS can easily force publishers/ developers to not do that sort of thing.

In an ideal world games should also be able to be bought singleplay only or multiplay only or packed together. The individual packs priced accordingly. Taking MW2 as an example it would be something like this: singleplayer 30$, multiplayer 30$, both 55$. This is hard to do looking at packaging, or newer games that make the line between online and offline disappear as in Brink, so they say Splash Damage.

Knowing that all the above is mere daydreaming, my final point is the most practical. Why do those publishers want a piece of the pie? Who told them second hand games is big business? yes Gamestop and the likes. We should've, and still should, only buy/ sell/ trade games directly from each other! power to the gamers! We would be cheaper off too!