turned out it did not

You don't think a lot of companies went under because they weren't making money? Maybe it was a poor business model and not second hand gaming. I don't know.

I looked at some numbers a few weeks back and the split in revenue in the UK currently is something like 54% digital, 40% physical and less than 6% used sales. Digital includes DLC, season passes, online subs etc, yet it's rising year over year while physical is dropping.


Pre-owned is now only 10% of digital revenue.

It was never a big problem to begin with, but a nice excuse for online passes, microtransactions and holding content back for DLC. Now we're used to those practices the boogeyman doesn't need to be mentioned anymore.

Oh please. Sony is not some shining knight in armour, looking out of the little guy. They simply used that image to their advantage in order to win the PR battle and a console generation. 

I rememebr when I was working at EB games, I still remember when I put a sticker on Gears of War used raising the price from 39.99 to 54.99.  Used games are 5 bucks less than new.  Which makes it worse with our dollar :(.  Though other places like Game Shack and VGP have cheaper used prices.

They used it as an excuse to push DLC and selling digital copies for the same price as retail. Looks like it mostly worked.

Kind of off topic but thought I'd share this with you since it'll probably save you some money. Someone had a similar problem to you and there is a way to share DLCs between your two PS4s:

Whenever you buy something, the content seems to bind itself to your primary PS4 and your own PSN account. So your content can be accessible only on your Primary PS4 or whenever you are logged into your own account. So for you and your wife to play your DLC, what you have to do is this:

• Either set her PS4 as your primary, giving her console "access" to your DLC, and then just play yourself on your own PS4,using your own PSN Account.
• Let her log on her PSN account on your PS4, and you log on your PSN account on her PS4(she has access to DLC cause playing on Primary PS4, you have access to it cause you are using the PSN account which made the purchase)

It's pretty simple, really. Just as with DRM, companies try things until they find something that works. The actual key is to hide your control method behind something people like, such as Steam DRM.

With the games themselves, the first solution was simply the market moving toward digital, which is obviously a huge boon. Even when a publisher is offering a digital game on sale, they're making far more than a used copy being sold, where they get zero.

The second piece has been the rise of DLC. At first, DLC was mostly throw-away attempts to make a little extra profit but developers have since realized that by offering DLC that people really want to play, they can make far more money. DLC has become an important part of the industry.

It's kind of emulating the car industry, where cars themselves have a modest margin compared to aftermarket sales.

Simple - It never was a problem. That was an industry wide agenda to force a higher adoption of Digital Downloads. Original plan for Xbox One was actually situated on idea that this was going to happen (a system like original XB1 would only be successful in a higher Digital adoption world). Add to the fact SONY nor Nintendo jumped on board and mass rejection by the consumer. Mission abort.

It was never as big of an issue as they wanted to make it seem like. They're all in for the business and profits, of course they'll flip out if they see that they're losing money.