I bellieve you accidentally deleted my message. 

Anyways,  as I said the problem is with retailers selling stuff used side by side with brand new products within the first week of release.  Can you name another product that does that like the gaming industry?

Other products have no grace period either, you can rent plenty of stuff the same day you can buy it. If I sell my blu-ray of Django unchained tomorrow, do you really think the shop is going to hold it back until some unspoken to sell used date has arrived?

The problem with video games is that the perceived value is mainly based on hype, hence they drop down in value so quickly. If you can't even make your game good enough to hang on for a month then whose fault is that?

You are talking about hypothetical situations.  People don't do that is what Im saying where as gamers do.

And they have to pay for the rights to rents those movies or games.

If it happens, they can surely expect another game crash. "Hardcore" gamers will accept it because they accept whatever the industry throws at them, no matter how disrespectful or dumb it is, but the mass market won't. No Call of Duty will save PS4 and 720 if this happens.

It isn't as big a problem with books and movies since those are based on a multi tiered solution.
The hype draws people to the cinema, collectors are the ones that buy the physical copies 4-6 monts later, cheap rentals for the rest.
Books appear first in hardcover, with a much cheaper softcover version appearing much later, plus an even cheaper digital version.

Should games offer Gaika type play only for the first few months before any to own versions appear?
Or release a steelbook collectors editions first for $80 or more, with a $50 standard version releasing a few months after?
Or maybe a download only version for the first month, and release boxed versions later while dropping the price of the download version?

The game industry likes to create maximum hype to sell their extremely front loaded product in one go to as many people as possible. They've trained gamers to buy day 1, forget a week later to buy the next hyped game. Blocking used will not break that habit, it will only block a lot of gamers from giving a new game a chance.

I wonder what the figures are for pc games nowadays. How many full price sales vs how many steam sale copies. The most I've payed for a non boxed full pc game is under $20, most sub $10. Habit is broken there anyway. I don't buy pc games day 1 anymore. I actually hardly play on pc anymore apart from some exclusives.

It's hard to say.  Steam is great because they offer such great deals and plus gamers really like valve.  I'd say they do fairly well and it shows good signs for digital in the future.  Even Microsoft and Sony has taken note from Valve on digital sales. 

As far as day 1 sales on Steam I like how you can pre-download and then when it gets released it is automatically on your Computer.  Something I think MSFT/Sony needs to do in the future with digital.

This is tangential. But...so what? They abandoned the pretense that the classes mean jack or shit. You could max everything with any character regardless of class. Shoot, there were folks who deliberately picked classes that wouldn't make them level up much because they never used those skills, just so they could avoid enemies becoming damage sponges.

Before we give them too much credit, remember that they're part of the reason it's illegal to rent games in Japan, and that they tried to push the same situation here in America before the courts told them to fuck off.

Yes, I'm still bitter.

Because sheep merely bleat when shorn.

Yes, you could max whichever skills you decided to level in the older games, but classes still gave you a immediate boost to certain skills. They emphasized playing the game in a particular fashion, and maybe tagging a school of magic that you liked or a skill to make your class even more unique. Skyrim throws the baby out with the bathwater and just removes any sense of customization you have over your character. It is a symptom of a larger problem is what I am saying ... they got rid of birthsigns too (unless you rub up against a bunch of stones scattered around skyrim).

I just want the abilty to make permanent choices with my character. I have played Skyrim extensively both on my profile and some of my friends, and I can honestly not notice any difference between our characters aside from the gear we are wearing. This cuts into replay value precisely because I have no desire to make a new profile ... he is just going to end up exactly the same as my current character with the only difference being the pants he is wearing.

Okay, I can respect the sentiment. I still maintain that the execution in prior games was so deficient that abandoning it entirely was perfectly acceptable for me, but I certainly understand the urge for additional customization.

I do think it's rather ironic that Japanese companies don't complain too much about used game sales where the used game market is much larger than it is in the US.