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twesterm on 22 February 2010
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Kenryoku_Maxis said:

Look, I know you've taken upon yourself to defend the rights of game developers for whatever reason, but not all games are equal and not all games can be obtained easily.  Sometimes they either need to be obtained used for a myriad of reasons and yes, there are a host of games that either get limited releases or don't even get full releases at launch, causing them to be rare from the start.  Sure, you can go find a million copies of Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2 right now, but try and find a new copy of WarioWare Touched!, Dragon Quest V or Pinball Hall of Fame, The Williams Collection.  Yeah, they're not only out of print, but went out of print less than 6 months of their release.  I'm not even going to go into even older games such as Suikoden II, Pikmin 2 or Zone of Enders 2.

Aside from the obvious examples of games going out of print, there's the examples of people just waiting for a game to get cheaper.  And there's no crime against this.  As has been stated in this thread, developers can encourage people to buy a game new, which they are with DLC and exclusive content for people who buy it new.  But when a developer cuts the game soon after it drops off from its initial $40-60 price point, there's no alternative than it to be immediately put into the 'used' category and people have to buy it used.  If developers are so angry at people buying used games, developers should instead give people more incentives to buying a new game for longer periods.  Like SquareEnix is with Dragon Quest IX and Nintendo with Pokemon (both allowing people to download content once aq week for up to a year).

Every one of those games were easy to find when they were originally released.

It's pretty common sense for highly desired games that have been out of print for a long time to be rare.  I don't know what your point is there.  You could walk into any store in 1995 and buy Chrono Trigger but it's $100+ today, does that mean they didn't produce enough?

And you're right, there's no crime in waiting for a game to get cheaper and your developer cutting the price so soon is just another argument not for this thread, though it's a pretty simple one.  If there isn't enough interest in the game, there's no reason to keep it full price.