It's not a bad idea.

@Cartman: Not necessarily. Their issue with used game sales is that one person would actually buy a copy of the game, and then sell it off to another person. For every person that buys the used game, that's one copy of a new game the company could be selling. What's worse (again, to them) is that stores like GameStop actually make extra money off of this- since it's used, they don't have to muck around with royalties and suchlike. It's for this reason that the chain has been pushing people to sell their old games.

If we're going to try and figure out why new games aren't selling, we might as well talk about the cost. The average new game is around 50 dollars, 60 if you're on the PS3 or 360. Even if there's a chockload of content, that's still quite a bit of money your average consumer is throwing out the window. And if there's not that chockload of content, or it's not that grand? Ohhh, there will be blood...

I think whiny cunt developers should stop demanding that people give even more money to one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries around.

Not everyone can afford to pay £50 for every game they want so this 'a used sale is a lost new sale' theory holds about as much water as piracy to lost sales is a 1:1 ratio.

This cunt can go fuck himself. Restrict games to one buyer through lame tactics like using codes? How about releasing something people want to buy at a price they can afford and then offering top notch support and content updates that are value for money after the fact.

Dickheads like this are what is wrong with the industry, instead of asking "How can we come out with something people want to support" they are busy coming up with schemes to force people into handing over more money. Always out to penalize the customer.

If publishers weren't so concerned with retail shelf space digital distribution would be way ahead of where it is now anyway (Call of Duty pricing being a perfect example). If they want the money that badly why not enforce a royalty scheme for used sales?

That won't work with game rentals. If they made the games cheaper then you would have less of an incentive to sell the game back. When I bought Viva Pinata, I bought it new for $20 and I could have bought a used copy for less but it wasn't worth the risk of getting a scratched disc.

Haha scratch codes, they tried those in the early days of anti-piracy too. Where are they now?

Don't companies like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Movie Gallery, Family, Video, Hastings, etc. Pay video game developers a lot of money to have the game in their stores for rent?

Well, they don't rent out a game just once, and then you're nullifying an audience who wants to try your game before you buy it, potentially losing a lot of business.

Tsk tsk. The only way to combat re-sale is to eventually go digitally distributed (which we're on the way to), but it's going to be some time especially with a company like GameStop that makes 7.1 billion dollars.

@ MB - You make a good point. I can honestly say that in the future i can see devolpers demanding a percentage ( And a high percentage at that ) of every one of their pre-owned games that have been traded in and sold again.
@ Timmeh - Exactly. They charge way too much as it is, and now there trying to take away a system that is helping us afford new games?

If i was a dev, as long as i was making enough profit to carry on making games, i would be stoked that people were buying my game in the first place. But thats just me.

Resale of used media certainly is not something new. Why are they complaining about this now? Are they trying to make up for lost revenue from piracy? I do not enjoy being lumped in with game thieves just because I buy my games used. BLASPHEMY! How dare I spend less than $60 or whatever ridiculous amount they want for a new game.

New games are (in my opinion) extremely expensive. I don't often buy a game when its first released unless its something I have been really anticipating.

Respectfully choke on your fist-fulls of cash. Thanks.

I couldn't care less. Actually, wait, my apathy is bottomless, so I probably could care less.

Sorry, Mr. Braben.
I pirated your wonderful Elite, but I actually bought your equally wonderful Frontier (the game, not the company).
I was 12 years old and I could have NEVER afforded to buy more than one game a year.
GameStop is ONE side of the business, but there are a LOT of games being sold to friends or on ebay (or Amazon Marketplace).
I buy (now, because I can afford) 3-5 games a month, and sell 2-3 of them afterwards. If I couldn't sell them, I would only buy 2-3, which is about 3 games less.
One of the games I don't buy will be a Braben game :)
You see? I buy more games because I can sell them later... And yes, please make Elite for PS3 :)

I rarely buy used games but, I can see why developers aren't very fond of stores like Gamestop. It's pretty ridiculous how much money Gamestop makes off of the sales of used games. That money should be going to developer but, that's never going to happen. Digital distribution is definitely an option but, I still like having a physical disc and case for all of my games.

Here's an idea...just make the games cheaper and support them more. Instead of a Madden coming out every year, why not just have the engine on one disc, and then you have updates you can get to update that engine...imagine that! Being a good developer? WOW...also how about making quality titles that dont suck and letting us try them before we buy so we dont get stuck with shit that we pawn off to get the good titles...

But what's the big deal anyway. They made their initial dollars off the title...go fuck yourself 22 billion dollars a year industry, you don't need any more money!

I see more of a massive drop in general game sales and development of a more aggressive hacking community to be the end result of this sort of thing. Then again, I rarely buy pre-owned games except for when the title I'm seeking is no longer being offered in a sealed box.

I really don't buy pre-owned games or sell my own back. The trade in values are horrendously low and add to that that buying a pre-owned game often only saves you 5$ (on good titles anyway). It simply isn't worth it most of the time sure you can find lower scoring games for cheap but that can be true even of new copies of said game.

And people without internet in their consoles should do what, cry?

It's a good idea... as long as they actually add things to the game, rather than taking something that would have already been there and locking it.

a few points
#1 you can fake codes: I can't tell you how many times I have gotten a coke or pepsi code during their contests with a "win free item" under the cap and when I go online to claim it I get "sorry that code has already been entered"- that is crap, and what will you end up with? people returning the games to say that they couldn't get the content-
#2 if you want games to sell more new you should learn a little bit about economics- supply and demand- games are sold b/c ppl want them for the price point- Imagine if you went to a clothing store and everything that was there was $80 - $80 for a nice leather coat- not a bad deal $80 for a pair of jeans- well not so sure about that $80 for a pair of socks- go fuck yourself- that is what the industry is doing- if you sell well produced high end games for $60, they will sell- that is a given- but if you sell every game for $60 not all of them will sell well. As well you have to take into consideration the fact that retailers are not given the opportunity to promote games by price dropping them- so you can't say hey it is $60 @ gamestop, but wal-mart is selling it for $50- so instead you end up waiting for the price to drop overall when the game is out of popularity or doesn't sell well(like I did with rainbow 6 vegas that dropped recently to $19 and I am doing w/ resistance waiting for 2 to come out so the old price drops)- which hurts not only initial sales , but overall revenue. Honestly, if there were some amusing, or well done short $20 games when I walked into a store- I wouldn't stress on just picking them up at random- but @ $60 it becomes a bigger decision since if you buy a few games you are looking @ a couple of hundred dollars.
#3 By not allowing resale you are boosting piracy, since you are taking those that can't afford the full price for a game and saying "no" to them, they will usually instead opt to get it for free, and at least in the world of handhelds where you either purchase a cart or rewrite the firmware, and the games are small and easily obtainable- you are pretty much giving up future games rather than just the ones at the time

Seeing as I only purchase the games I know I will want to have in my collection for repeated future playing and use GameFly to play games I'm not willing to purchase, this would only effect me in that games I rented would be gimped. That would piss me off to no end and would therefore never rent those games, so really the guy/developer really isn't getting anything out of it. Sure, I may not have been willing to purchase the first game his dev house decided to make but then I would never play it and never become a fan and wish to support them with future purchases. He would ultimately lose out regardless.

My opinion: bad move.

Developers need to talk to Gamestop about that. They're the ones making plenty of money off of resells. Maybe if they ask nicely, or buy an edge card and preorder something, I dunno.

Major game retailers would have a rough time staying in business without preowned sales. That's where their profit margin is. New games aren't marked up a whole hell of a lot.

I've just started using Goozex, and feel much less "cheated" out of my game's value - that's because the buy and sell prices for a game is the same. So if I sell my mediocre game, I have the equal purchasing power to buy an equally mediocre game.

With regard to this proposed "save the developer" system, I think that this idea isn't super great, cause as other people have mentioned before, I think code pirating would be WAY too rampant.

However, imo, digital distribution is the way to go to save developers. I don't know how many of you use Steam, but it is THE best way to download your PC games, because you can install them on multiple computers, and your only limit is that the account can only be "on" on one computer at a time. It's kind of like iTunes authorization, except I don't believe it limits how many computers you activate.

Original Half-Life copies still sell today because of Steam - those who want to play counterstrike can't just pirate it. The game MUST run through Steam.

Also, I believe that prices are very fair on Steam - I just bought a "new" (although digital) copy of Bioshock for $15.

And look what happened to Crysis sales because it wasn't offered through digital distribution (or at least through Steam).

My point is that if you force digital distribution, there will be less pirating and, because the game is selling more, the price will go down faster.

Next up GM is going to make you license your steering wheel so you can't use anyone else's and you have to use one unique per car.

Assholes.

I can't afford to buy new games for every game I want, that's why I use Goozex. If I buy something, I should have the right to resell it when I no longer want it. I don't mind buying some cheap game through download, but I will never buy a full-fledged $60 game that way. If I can resell it, it doesn't matter that I end up not liking the game, because I can get some of my money back, not so with digital download.

I'm just going to start pirating games once people start listening to cheap assholes like this guy. Every fucking industry on earth has item resale and trying to bring games out of that is just a mindboggling display of penny-pinching from an industry that has nowhere to go but upwards in terms of the money it makes. Not to mention that Nintendo posted more than a billion dollar profit last quarter.