| 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... |
And if you want to sell that TV, you can. It doesn't hurt the TV industry if you sell your TV to someone else.
Of course you can trade games at Best Buy and buy a TV. Or you could trade in your TV and buy new games.
Fact: If you make games that people don't want to sell when they're "finished" playing it, it fixes everything. This is Nintendo's approach, and if you have a look at the used game market for first-party Nintendo titles, the vast majority of them have prices only very slightly below the price of a new game... in which case, new copies get sold. Notice how most "evergreen" titles are Nintendo titles?
If developers and publishers want their games to retain their value and not appear in the used game market, they should focus on making them in a way that encourages keeping the game. This isn't achieved by DRM, online passes, too much focus on online modes, etc, but by making a quality game that the player will want to return to in 6 months time, through deep, fun gameplay.
Also, as has already been pointed out by others, it's not just the "money gained from trading in a used game goes towards a new game" side, but also the "if I can trade in the game if I don't like it, then I'll be more willing to buy the game new". If you aren't sure of a game, why would you risk US$60 on it? On the other hand, if you can get US$40 back if you don't like it, then you're only risking US$20.
It's also worth noting that the gaming industry's biggest problem isn't used game sales, it's an obsessive focus on major existing IP, sucking each one of them dry of value and then discarding them. It's the videogame market equivalent of the oil companies. Compare with what Nintendo is doing - yes, they're making big-budget titles like Zelda and X, but they're also making games like Yarn Yoshi and Dillon's Rolling Western. They make the major titles, and they also make lesser titles that are cheaper to produce and provide more variety. And they provide appropriate levels of marketing (usually - Wii U marketing so far notwithstanding). And they have reasonable expectations of sales numbers - they don't release Metroid games expecting 10+ million sales just because it had a bigger budget than the previous one.
The gaming industry complaining about used games is like America complaining about illegal immigration as the cause for the massive and growing debt crisis - not only are they unrelated "problems", but proper understanding of the one would help to resolve the other.
