I Have sympathy with both sides, here.
Gamers are demanding more from their triple A games, forcing development costs to balloon - we've gone from 30 people teams running on a 18-24 month development cycle in the PS2/Gamecube era, up to 100+ Teams on 2-3 development cycles.
Yet the game titles have not gone up in price - most games have been selling at the £30-£40 new range since the SNES and Mega Drive days. They can't really push the new prices up any higher, without alienating the consumers.
Gamestop/Game/Gamestation have a very obvious 3 part business strategy, which massively compounds this problem;
- Push Pre-orders, to get as many full price day one sales as possible
- Give good trade in prices to new games to get back as many copies as possible while they're still in demand
- push the 2nd hand copies on buyers, as all profit goes to them, as opposed to publishers and developers getting a cut.
Only step one in that strategy benefits anyone but the retailer. some game stores see the same copy of an individual title a half dozen times in the launch months.
I'm in the fortunate position of being a 20-something with disposable income, and care enough about the games industry and developers to buy new whenever possible. I cannot begrudge any pocket money saving kid, hard pressed parent, or hard up adult for saving a bundle on a second hand copy, which they're told is functionally identical to a new one - it'll be fun to see how Game's 2nd hand slogan - "Everything's the same but the price" - fairs against this new direction.
Many of you are making analogies to to the second hand car or house market. While I take on board the general point, we are dealing with a mostly digital product, here - as long as the disk is not scratched, there is no degradation in the product you get; If you buy a car, you get it with an empty odometer, in pristine condition, with no scratches, dings, or crumbs in the drivers seat. New House, you get to specify the furnishings and fittings you want.
The only market I can think of with a like-for-like compassion is the 2nd Hand DVD market, and even then the studios can make a good portion of their production costs back in the cinema, beforehand.
I may not like it, but I can understand where Sony is coming from - they get to make some money from second hand sales, turning the online component into a service instead of a freebie (It would be more interesting and harder to justify if 1st Party Microsoft games started doing this, as they're already charging for Xbox live - as many have pointed out, 3rd party publishers, like EA, have been doing this with their games for a while on all platforms)
Until Digital Distribution really kicks off - to iTunes Levels - and we can cut the real bad guys in all this - Game & Co. - out of the equation, I don't see a nice way around this.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
