| Twistedpixel said: 1. You have no rights to content not given to you. Its pretty clear really, you buy what they offer and if they choose to make part of their offer an online redeption theres nothing impinging upon your rights and they are within their rights as a seller. They can make a game and cut it into three parts for $60 each and they are still within their rights. They can make a game with almost no content on the disc and they are still within their rights. Your rights extend only to the point where you can accept their offer or decline their offer based upon what they are giving you. 2. As a seller they have no responsibilities at all to anyone buying their games 2nd hand. No warranty is implied and no assurances are given that the content for the 2nd, 3rd, 10th buyer has to be identical to the content provided by the first. Just as no warranty is given to 2nd hand purchasers, no service plans for cars etc this also applies to games. Again like above you can factor this into your decision as to whether or not you want to buy the game used or new. The responsibility here falls upon the buyer and buyer beware is the order of the day in the second hand market. 3. People who tend to buy games and trade them will also tend to buy them used from Gamestop. Its $50 with the loyalty card and another $5 on the trade back. So this means that a typical used game may go through 5 or 6 hands before someone finally keeps it. In terms of the economics of the situation, any money made by Gamestop is at least mostly money not made by publishers. Even in a perfect scenario where someone who buys a game and then sells it used and that copy is bought used but never traded still nets less money for publishers and more money for Gamestop. The money returned to the ecosystem is less than the margin Gamestop makes.
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These are all technically correct statements, but they don't address whether or not this is a smart idea.
I buy Uber-duber Movie 3 on Blu-ray and bring it home. I plug it in to my Blu-ray player and it says, "to view some of the special features you'll have to go online and enter this code". Crap. Why am I being asked to take this extra step to reach the content I just paid for?
A month later I take Uber-duber Movie 3 and try to resell it, but the used movie store only pays me half the usual price because the movie was designed to be more expensive for used buyers and that's driving away customers for used copies of Uber-duber Movie 3. Crap.
Jim sees my copy of Uber-duber Movie 3 and picks it up. He gets it home and discovers that the only way for him to see any of the special features is to buy them for an extra $10 and wait for them to download. Crap.
Sure Studio X saves some money on second-hand sales of Uber-duber Movie 3 but they pissed off customers in the process. How long will Studio X get away with that?
