The thing with Steam is that it least offers you something extra in return for not being able to resell your game (auto-patching, community etc), although new games are certainly poor value compared to somewhere like Amazon. SecuROM limited activations and the new hare-brained scheme by UbiSoft just punish people who buy the game.

In very recent times some famous game developers have either gone broke or been taken over by bigger corporations due to video games not selling enough copies which means they do not make enough money to stay in business. There is a minimum amount of copies per game that must be sold to ensure the development costs are recouped before profits are made from the sales. The minimal amount of copies will vary greatly in every case due to the varying amount of time and money invested into developing the games.

One failed game from a developer can mean game over for that development company. Cut throat business and it is not getting any easier.

Games developers should be adopting more realistic business models, ones that don't require a game to sell, say, a million copies before realising any profit. There are plenty of small PC developers doing very nicely on restricted budgets by targeting niche markets and selling a couple of hundred thousand copies. There seems to be a dangerous obsession amongst some publishers that every game must be a blockbuster- that's a very risky way of doing business when one failure might bring the whole firm down.

Oh my. Very wise idea. As if something this substantial in ownership/copyright would have changed by software developers.

This would have massive effects on everything from selling houses to cars to everything.

Please do your homework and stop this stuff. Selling a property you owned is not illegal.

What if you want to play a game but don't agree with the price for it?

What if you don't like a developer/publisher and that you don't want to support their business model?

What if you bought into the hype of a game and it was complete utter bore/crap and you want to be compensated for part of the $60+ you were ripped off for.

But don't worry, I will be "out of the game" when you young kids accept the gaming overlords digital distribution model and it become the only option to purchase media.

If you really want to hurt the publisher or developer, buying used is not the answer alone (for reasons given by several people earlier in this thread).

The answer then is either piracy (if you're not against it), borrowing the game from a friend, or waiting really long before getting a used copy (then you'll be contributing a really minimal amount, if it can even be measured).

I have no doubt the the software companies would try to get it declared illegal, expect that the very copyright law which prevent piracy explicitly declares the second hand market totally legal; its called the First Sale Doctrine; it was created in 1908, and officially added to U.S. copyright laws in 1976.  Copyright is intended to make tangle what is intangible; if anyone can copy something, then it loses its value.  First sale does this too; if you cannot sell something, then it also loses value.

Copyright is just that, the right to make legal copies, but once those copies are made and sold, the owner of the copies has the right to pass ownership to someone else.  Piracy is making illegal copies, someone buys one copy, then releases thousands, possibly millions of copies to other people, while the creator only makes the one sale.  In the second hand market, someone buys it, then sells that copy to someone else; the creator made one sale, and at no time does more than one person use the copy; the first person has forfeited all rights to the copy in the second hand sale.

What you're really complaining about is that costs have sky rocketed, and devlopers have allowed it to happen; instead of trying to control costs to maintain financial solvency, they are lashing out at anything that they see as limiting their ability to sell, illegal or legal.  This also includes competition from other developers; too many games by too many developers, means less money for any particular developer, and those expensive games become expensive flops.

I agree with HappySquirrel, it's easy for someone to make the case that a second hand sale is a lost sale for the creator, but the opposite is also true; if you remove the right to resale, someone who buys a bad game and can't get rid of it will be a lot less likely to open their wallet in the future, sticking only with games that they are sure of.  And if they get stung by a "surefire" game, expect them to close their wallets even more, and possibly stop gaming entirely.

Thing is, most game retailers like GameStop basically live off used games, since it's their biggest source of income.

And honestly, I have no sympathy for behemoth gamehouses who end up splurging tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars into a single game, and then expect us to actually buy them with an insance price tag, like 75€, often without any chance of trying the game beforehand, ie. thru demo versions.

I live on a pretty strict budget, so I can only buy a scant few full-priced games a year - thus, used games and the occasional sale are basically the best way for me to buy legal copies of games (excluding indie and freeware games), since piracy really isn't my thing.

Then Ebay is the worst.