Why is buying used games such a big deal nowadays?

[Michael-5]

Miguel_Zorro said:

Michael-5 said:

tracyllrkn said:
Probably because publishers are barely making a profit, or even not making a profit at all.

Last I checked EA, Activision, and Microsoft were doing anything but struggling. Like I said Square Enix wouldn't have existed if Final Fantasy didn't do exceptionatly well, it was just as hard to be big back then as it is now.

How can you say publishers are struggling now, but not before, when we had rental game services, and a smaller market?

Many, many game companies have gone out of business. Here's a list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_video_game_companies

Not all of the companies on that list went out of business for financial reasons, but many of them did.

Also, the cost of a game 20-30 years ago was more, in both real and inflation adjusted terms, that it is now.  I remember paying $70 for SNES games.  That's like $110 in today's dollars.

How many of those have gone debunk recently? Do you know if statistically more companies are going bust now then before? I can tell you that a lot of the bankrupt game companies on that list went bankrupt in the 1980's. Remember the big gaming crash of 83?

Also where the heck did you pay $70 for SNES games? SNES games were $40/$50 brand new, N64 games were $50 for the most part too. Nowadays a brand new game day 1 costs $60, and can have anything from $30-$80 of DLC.

$50 in 1996 is about $75 in todays currency, so you're right games are cheaper now, but not as much as you make it seem and when you factor in DLC, they really aren't.