Why is buying used games such a big deal nowadays?

[Pemalite]

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.

Just because they wen't out of business, doesn't mean used games killed them off.
You forget that essentially the entire developed world went into recession, who knows what the sales might have been otherwise!