twesterm said:
If you're borrowing a game from a friend there's obviously a want to play it. That want may not be enough to buy it new, but you're still getting something from it and you're getting something for nothing. In the case of lending the publisher and Gamestop miss out on the sale. That all said, I'm fine with used games and even lending games, I'm just pointing out the flaw in your logic. It's your license so it's yours to sell, lend, or even give away. What isn't right is two people using the license at the same time. |
It only works out to a missed sale if it can be demonstrated that another copy of a game would have been sold if trading did not occur. The videogame publishers that want to make the argument that trading has a substantial impact on game sales should be able to quantify the sales increase they've seen from the death of videogame rental stores (like Blockbuster); and, Being that people who rented videogames demonstrated a willingness to pay for the content, the sales loss associated to trading games should be estimated at being substantially less than that.
Beyond that, there are many games I have lent-to and/or brought over to friends houses that translated into additional sales for a publisher; with Guitar Hero 3 (in particular) I know of 5 people who would have never bought the game had I been unable to "trade" it. These additional sales are never factored into the black-magic "lost sale" calculation of publishers.
There is a pattern I have noticed (and I'm certain other people have aswell) that good game series tend to have increasing sales as long as quality is maintained until they hit a saturation point. I suspect that a large portion of "new" buyers of sequels buy in because they were exposed to the series through one of the channels that these publishers are trying to close. It seems to me that preventing these actions could easily translate into lower future games for a series with minimal gains for the current iteration.
