The Other Used Game Argument
There's much furore in the games industry at the moment about the used game market, and how damaging it is to developers and publishers. Companies like EA are now pulling off bullshit that rivals PC piracy protection to stop consumers from purchasing used games.
I'm once again not going to discuss the ethics of locking part of your content against those who choose not to buy the product in quite the right way, although my opinion on said practice is probably implied. Short of just realising that they're fighting a losing battle and giving up on this sort of shit, this method is actually probably the best way for publishers to encourage purchasing of new games.
But in the rush to stamp out the used games market, publishers seem to be missing quite a big point. The used games market allows many customers to buy a lot more of their games.
I buy games new. A small part of this is to do with my desire for the people who made the product I'm purchasing to actually get paid for it, but a much larger part of this is that I like to play games as soon as they come out, when a used copy tends to only be £2 cheaper than a new one anyway. £2 seems to be a reasonable premium for a nice sealed copy with a disk that no one has wiped their arse with.
But if I couldn't trade in my games when I'm finished with them, there's no way I'd be able to play all the games I do new. Part of this is that I've been playing games for a long time, and have a reasonable idea of what a game is worth, to me, compared to other forms of media, and they're very rarely worth their £40 asking price.
Most games these days are blockbusters designed to be played through once, then sustained with online multiplayer. And being as no game has yet to feature online multiplayer that has kept me interested for more than a couple of hours, asking £40 for 5-10 hours of entertainment seems steep, especially when games that cost that much five years ago would have had almost double the content (that's content, as opposed to texture resolution.)
But thanks to trade-in store credit, particularly at HMV where they are prone to give you ludicrously high returns for recent games, it's possible for me to play these games, new, with money going to the developers and everything, without paying the steep asking price. I recently bought Bulletstorm for £40, and traded it in for £35 three weeks later. Providing I keep shopping at HMV, I effectively got Bulletstorm for £5, and it's worth way more than that. Bonus.
This means I'm typically paying £15-£20 for a new game, which is a vastly more reasonable asking price for the majority of today's games. If I couldn't trade in my used games for credit, then I wouldn't be able to afford to buy all these new blockbuster games, and EA wouldn't ever see any of my money.
I'd end up only ever putting down cash for the games I know will be worth their asking price, and in my case there are only 2 or 3 of these every year. Everything else I'd be picking up months after release, when the price has fallen below £20 and the fate of the game and the studio that made it would have long since been decided.
Basically, I don't really believe that the purchase of used games is actually going to put companies like EA out of business, and while it definately sucks that developers don't see a cent of a used game sale, this is problem with the whole market, and the big companies should be taking on the retailers, not their consumers.
Because if EA got their wish and there was no used game market, then I wouldn't have bothered playing Dead Space 2 or Bulletstorm, which means I'd have missed out on a couple of almost-great games, and their developers would have missed out on getting paid for making them.
It might be something companies should consider before they decide to lock the use of the analogue sticks until you enter a 56-digit code on their next middling-to-average blockbuster.
(Note that while I've single out EA here, they are not by any means the only company doing this. It's just that the last few games I've played have been by EA, and so they sprung to mind as the best example of corporate consumer-shafting.)
