Should buyers of pre-owned titles be punished?

[yanamaster]

It is not wise to see games as licenses that allow you to run on one machine, like your typical pc software. Games are made to be available to the mass public, pretty much like dvd's, vhs and other entertainment media. Just like my movies need to work on any dvd player i own, the same goes for games, they need to work any any of their respective consoles.

This by default denies games the status of license products and why they can not be subjected to no resale movement. PC games are split right now since some of them are being made into license type products (like Assassins Creed 2) but this will ultimately fail and be counter-productive as consumers will not accept that the same game can be resold if bought for a console but not if it's for pc. Like in previous discussions, the outcome will be simple: massive pirating.

While it does make sense that buying things used means not getting the whole package, the level or depreciation that comes with buying used is not something that you can arbitrarily gauge. Let's say that someone is selling a 1 year old car that was not used much, thus making the car practically new while still being sold at a lower price just due to the fact it's one year older. How dou you gauge depreciation levels for a game? There isn't really any way to do so.

The only reasonable thing to do would be the following:

1. Devs have to lower prices of their games to be competitive against the 2nd hand market

2. Don't offer incentives like free dlc as it isn't a deal breaker, especially if you offer different dlc for different deals in different shops. Instead return to the old schematic, release a full game with no extras and offer all dlc for some premium, so that even if the game is bought used, there is still potential money to be made.

3. Drop the license approach towards games as it is impossible to implement on consoles, very hard to implement on pc's and is met with huge hostility from the consumers that devs want to sell to. Once again, games are products meant to be in available to the masses so don't shut them off.