Publishers complain that they don’t get money when a game is resold. What industry does? Rental industries, that’s it. No industry to my knowledge, where you buy the product entirely, forces you to pay money back to the vendor when you sell it on.

DVD’s, CD’s, books, are all media that get resold without paying money to the manufacturer or publisher again. You might hear them complain a bit, but why, they sold a product, they no longer own it, and they don’t own that CD/DVD anymore, you do. They have no right to that property.

The difference is that the video games industry are in a unique position, they can do something about it. They can bundle a code for online play with each new copy. Then if the game is sold on, and the code is used, someone picking up the game second hand will have to play $10 for a code to go online.



Right now you can buy a game for $60, sell it back for say $30 a week later, and then someone pays $45 to get it used.

With a game that would require you to buy a $10 code to play online, they are going to sell the game used for $10 cheaper to compensate, and give the person trading it in $10 less for the trade in.

You would buy the game for $60, use the online code, sell it back a week later for $20 and the shop would sell it for $35. Though there will be fewer games pre-owned, so prices will stay higher for longer.

The original buyer who trades in games is the one that loses out, which is why some people are annoyed. It means part of the game is a consumable, like a packet of chips, that you can’t sell on again, which will take time to adjust to as games have not been seen as a consumable. All it means is it will change how people think about buying games.

People that buy games and then trade them on will have to accept they will get less money back when they trade it in if they use the game online, they will hold onto the game, not buy the game in the first place, wait till it’s cheaper or buy it used themselves.

As a buyer of used games it means you get a game for cheaper, but if you want to play online you have to pay the same price overall that you used to, if you don’t want to play the online component of the game you’re better off.

For publishers this means less people will buy their game new but they will make more money from selling the online access for used games. I think they will lose out overall as there will be less games being sold, both new and used.

As with all new ideas it will be tested and publishers can look at their sales and decide if this makes more money from them or not.

As a consumer you have to change the way you think about buying games. We as humans don’t like change, but change happens, so get used to it or do something about it. If you don’t like the way the industry is going then don’t by games that employ this strategy, if enough people stop buying these games publishers will get the message, stop doing it and settle back into the same place the rest of the media industry is.