| disolitude said: Not true. When a used games is traded in, it takes a potential sale away from a new game. You can have an endless cycle of users trading used games for other used games and only gamespot making money in the process. Also you can trade games at Best Buy and buy a TV for example. I've done it... |
Well, you specifically cited Gamestop, and Gamestop is kind of the most demonized entity in the used games witch hunt. But yeah, you can trade in used games to Best Buy or sell them on Ebay or give them away to Goodwill. So what? Again, if the industry needs to eradicate property rights in order to live, then it needs to fucking die.
A potential sale is not the same as an actual sale. This is the same way that every act of piracy is considered by some people to be a lost sale, but it isn't in the vast majority of cases. A pirated copy was rarely ever going to be a sold copy. The same is true to a very large extent with second hand sales as well when prices of new games (and even digital copies) are so stupidly resistant to the downward pressure exerted on them by the used market. A lot of those people will just simply buy fewer games, and the Cliff Bleszinskis of the world will still blame the consumer.
Even the complete eradication of used games and a 100% digital market place would not to solve the industry's woes. It wasn't that long ago that we were in the cartridge era, and as Mark Cerny pointed out at GDC, an $80 RPG would see as little as $1-2 going toward developer costs. That was insane, and dirt cheap optical media was something of a savior... for a while. But here we are again thanks, not to piracy or rentals or anything else, but to the explosive growth of gaming budgets because stupid investors and publishers demand that every single game be AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA and the next Call of Duty.
