[jordan0day]

"I personally am not a fan of used games (I don't see it as being much better ideologically than piracy, since the people who made the game are not getting compensated on resales which provide an identical experience to one that you get brand new)"

This argument is crazy. No one considers buying a user car grand theft auto, and no one considers being the second (or third, or tenth) owner of a house as some sort of scheme to defraud homebuilders.

Cars, homes, and video games are property. It should be the right of the property owner to do what they chose with their property, including selling it. The prices of new homes and new cars have been adjusted to compensate for the fact that that property will be resold. Why are video games any different?

If game publishers can't make a profit on their wares, they either need to charge more or spend less. The secondhand games market is not the problem, at all. The efforts of the publishers to kill off the secondhand market is a great example of the same sort of crappy, cartel-like practices we decry when it's done by, say, the wireless industry. The game industry shouldn't get a free pass to behave badly like this.

[batiudrami]

Haha, I knew it would be a controversial comment.

I've had this opinion for a while, and it comes from a perspective where, if you're prepared to look for it, all digital content is free. It can be pirated if you want, with a negligible prosecution risk. From there, I see two reasons to purchase content: either it's more convenient than piracy (Spotify, Steam), or you want to compensate those who worked hard on creating it.

Plus, I think that when you purchase a game, you're paying for an experience, rather than an object. For that matter, this is the same with books, and movies. You aren't paying for the paper it's printed on, or the disc in the case, it's the experience you have with the content - more of a consumable than a physical item. If you think this way, it's difficult to understand why you should be able to sell the distribution method and therefore transfer ownership of an experience.

There are issues with this argument, obviously. If you buy a DVD and have friends round to watch it, it seems silly that everyone should there should have to pay, which is a natural extension of this argument. I don't really have a solution to that.

The other issue with used games that I see, is that the only people making money off it are retailers. If I spend money on a game, it's because (as I noted earlier), I want the guys who worked hard on it to be compensated. If I buy a used game, I'm just giving money to GameStop.

Because I think games are experiences rather than physical objects, I don't think the property/cars/etc analogy holds. As I noted in another comment, buying a used car is not the same a new car, whereas buying a used game gives an identical experience to a brand new one.

[jordan0day]

I responded to your other comment below (about "identical experiences") and you responded to it, and I think we're closer to being conceptually on the same page than it might appear. But I'll go ahead and respond to this one, too.

I agree, a video game is more an experience than some functional, utilitarian object. (Interestingly, cars are often too sold as "experiences" -- maybe this is why their value decreases so precipitously after they've been driven off the lot, heh). I think that a game's value as an experience rather than "an object", though, is orthogonal to it's actual dollars-and-cents value. The value is the price people are willing to pay, plain and simple.

That is, a brand new, $60 game isn't really worth $60 to most people after it's been out for a couple of months. The used games market is more agile in recognizing this. If the first-party publishers became more agile, they'd wipe out the used games market. Why would I pay, say, $30 for a used, six month-old game, when I can get a brand new copy for the same price? The answer: I can't. The first-party publishers are still charging at least $40 or $50 for that game. The used games shop has recognized that the true value of that game, six months in, is actually $30. The publisher is in denial, or trying to take advantage of some sort of arbitrage by charging $40 or $50.

I think you're also discounting the fact that the first-party publishers do get a portion of that used games sale. That is, when someone buys a brand-new game at $60, and sells it to the used game shop for $30 a month later -- $30 of the original $60 purchase is coming from the used sale. Sure, in some cases the person buying that used copy for $35 or $40 might have bought a brand new copy if no used copies were available, but in many cases, that person might never have bought a copy at all. If the used market is shut down, maybe I stop buying the games when they're $60, because I know I can't get some portion of that money back to spend towards other games.

Anyway, as I noted in another comment, the price of a new car has not only the cost of materials and labor factored in, but also the cost of the probability that someone who buys that car used would have bought a new one instead, had the used car not been available. Video games should also be priced like this (I suspect they are, actually, and all the handwringing by the games industry is really just a misdirection).

TL;DR: In a free market, it doesn't matter if a good is experience-based of utility-based, its' price should reflect its actual value (which is determined by the market). Secondhand games aren't taking food out of developers mouths, inability to quickly adjust price to match actual value is. Shutting down the secondhand games market is a cartel/monopoly tactic, not actually beneficial for the general public.