First, let me explain what the crap is a Newspaper paywall.

Basically, the news corp wanted you to pay to access their website. A good example is New York Times website.

Now, if you try to google "NYT paywall", you'd get a how-to-hack on the first hit instead of the actual NYT site.

When news is free online, they think they can charge people for it.

Now, we are getting online passes for games. The similarity is few since it's not as bad as the news paywall.

We are seeing a shift in games becoming free to play and then pay for premium items or high level access such as WoW that lets you play until lvl20 completely free.

More and more MMO and numerous other fps, you can play for free. If people are cash strapped and rely on used games, the online pass would only push them more toward the free games.

We also know that the used games market influence the early adopter to a certain degrees. In that, they will shell out the full price to play the game day 1 but still can sell back the game and use that for the next new game. This online pass devalue the resell value.

On the grand scheme of things. I see it as the publisher cabalizing their own sales in the long run when people catches on with this new fangled Online Pass.

I agree that by devaluing the used copies, they're also devaluing the new copies. For two reasons:

1- people start realizing their games don't have much resale value and refrain from buying new games at full price
2- people have to trade in more games to get a new game, and therefore can't get as many new games with their old games (supply and demand says the new games should decrease in price).

The online pass is an attempt to squeeze out more revenue from gamers... but what if most gamers don't have the ability or the willingness to provide more revenue to the gaming industry?

solution to the used game market

Task 1. Big Publishers EA, MS, SONY, Activison, Ubisoft etc get together

Task 2. Agree to stop all orders to retailers globally (gamestop, ebgames) if they do not allow a 3-6 month period were used games cannot be sold.

Task 3. Once agreed on the period of time for new game exclusivity remove all online passes.

See this would work since most of the games sales happen in the first 3-6 months of release and having only New games available would increase sales overall. This is a plan the publishers may do and use there pulling power because this online pass is not the way to go.

I don't know, I don't care, but all my games new so it's completely irrelevent to me.

Actually, it does. Lets assume the following to be true,

1. Used games sales tanked and there's no money in the pot anymore for retailers such as Gamestop.

2. People who used to buy used no longer are buying and instead buying new games in fewer frequency.

3. People who bought new and then resell no longer buy as much due to lack of renewable fund.

So, with overall sales tanking further, there's less money to be had in the gaming industry. Which then, translate to fewer games being made, especially the higher quality ones.

I, too, only buy new games and keep them all. I just don't like it when they keep devalueing my games. If Nintendo does this, I would stop buying Nintendo games, too. Sure, it doesn't directly affect me right away, but I don't like to be bullied.