By offering things people want, that undermine used sales, it isn't that bad of a thing.  It isn't like their games will stop working offline.  A problem with EA, in regards to Madden, isn't that they come out with a new version of the game, and have people have to buy it to play online.  The problem is that they happened to lock out all competition, by having the only football games on the market with licensed players and teams.  The problem here is you have no other place to go, if they drop the ball on a new version.

Also, the support is not free for EA to provide.  Same with doing updates.  Their mission is to try to get as much money as they can, while consumers try to get the most stuff for least amount of money.

If you mean news, then stop reading it .  If you mean DLC, would you rather they take all the DLC and then resell the game at full price, with the DLC in it, forcing you to pay full price for it?  Or would you rather they never give you any new content at all and never release a new game? 

I see people complain HEAVILY about what Left For Dead 2 is doing.  And also complaints about DLC.

Retailers sell the platforms to play the games.  I am curious how platforms to play games will get sold, if the retailers aren't able to sell games.  Whatever the answer is, the console makers are going to have to step in and provide it.  Apple, with the iPOD, is showing one way.

First things first, I want to thank KylieDog, Relias, Strategyking92, and richardhutnik for participating. If you read my posts in this thread it's obvious that this is an issue that's interesting to me, thank you for engaging and continuing to engage in this thread and for bringing some thought provoking posts to the thread.

@ Relias: Thanks for bringing to my attention ebay and amazon; they admittedly slipped my mind and are important to this conversation. I have mixed feelings on this because while I still stand by my feelings of wanting the developer to get royalties, as far as the consumer is concerned ebay and amazon seem to be a much better way of buying and selling used games than gamestop. I just randomly did a search for ghostbusters for 360 on amazon, and you can buy the game used from a private seller for $43.98, or you can buy it used for 54.99 via gamestop. If used game sales are a necessity, I'd much rather see it through private sellers on amazon & ebay who (more often than not) put up fair prices for used games and the people are getting 100% of the money themselves, not a store credit for a fraction of what a title would be sold for at gamestop.

To your second point about gamestop not being affected as much as I think: I agree with you to an extent. Gamestop probably won't be affected that much because it's a yearly sports title, but lets not forget what we're dealing with here.  Say what you will about the game but it's always a HUGE seller, it's always considered one of the major releases every year, and if EA sets precedent I don't think it's far fetched to imagine more publishers doing this in the future, no matter what genre of game. Epic did this with the launch of gears of war 2, if you bought it new as an added bonus there was a code included in the box so you can download a handful of relit/reskinned maps from the first gears. So...I guess we'll see.

@richardhutnik, on your retailers/hardware stocking comments:
I'd like to piggyback off of what kyliedog said about toasters and microwaves and also offer the fact that best buy, among several other electronics chains sell the netflix/blu-ray player hybrid boxes and standalone netflix boxes. These companies are not affiliated with netflix, yet the hardware is still sold. Gamestop is still getting paid to stock new product (be it hardware or software) although it is admittedly very little. I would imagine that consumer demand for a certain piece of hardware would drive a company to stock it, whether it be digital download or not.

Anybody screwing over Gamestop is aces.

Just bring that DRM over and the console gamers can't do much about it. Welcome to PC gaming :P