[jordan0day]

But the price of that used car is also adjusted to reflect the wear/warranty/uncertainty. In an efficient market, the price of a car, used or new, reflects the actual value of that car.

Why should games be considered any different?

You also don't get an "identical experience" to a person who purchased the game new. The bits on the disc may be identical, but the experience isn't. For example, a game bought new in 2009 might look great in 2009, but by 2013 you've come to expect more. Likewise, there may be fewer players online for multiplayer experiences. There's also all sort of additional intangibles -- you probably won't be the first person in your peer group to play the game, so you can't brag how you beat it faster than someone else, or have the same feeling of shared experience when you ask "did you get past level X? How did you beat the lava golem?", and their response is "I don't know, I did that like two years ago."

The analogy isn't perfect, but hopefully it's illustrative enough. At the end of the day, both cars are video games have a certain value when new, and a certain, probably lessened, value when "used". The characteristics by which the value has decreased from new to used are different, but they're extant in both cases.

[batiudrami]

>The bits on the disc may be identical, but the experience isn't. For example, a game bought new in 2009 might look great in 2009, but by 2013 you've come to expect more.

That's a fair point. But a new copy of a game bought today that was released in 2009 will also cost closer to $5 than $60 - the decreased experience in that sense is already reflected in the retail price.

For me, ideally what would happen is that used game sales would go away [1], and as a result games would become cheaper, either when they first go on sale, or through heavy discounting more frequently (because people only have a set amount of money to spend on games).

This is essentially what has already happened with PC - there are no resale options, and prices discount far, far more quickly than on consoles. If you want the 'day one experience' as you described, you can get that, for $60. But you have the knowledge that, if you wait, it'll also be available for $30 in 3 months time, and $10 in the Christmas sales. Plus, on every single copy sold, ~70% of the money is returned to the publisher/developer.

[1] edit: As I noted elsewhere, I still think you should be able to lend games to friends. That is, I think, beneficial to publishers and consumers.

[jordan0day]

I think we've both said the things we wanted to say in this thread, so further replies might not be especially useful -- I just want to point out that I think your pricing decrease algorithm needs a little tweaking: Aliens: Colonial Marines, which got generally terrible reviews, was released on Steam on Feb. 12. So, four months ago. It's only dropped $10 in that time ($59.99 to $49.99).

I don't doubt that the publisher has probably done a little thinking about whether they'd sell enough copies at $30 rather than $50 to make up for the loss of per-sale profit, but it seems to me that what they (the publishers) are actually trying to do, by killing secondhand sales, is have their cake and eat it, too.

[batiudrami]

It depends on the game. At the other extreme, Borderlands 2 was released in September at $60, was $30 by October and $14 by May. I suspect that the reputation of Aliens: Colonial Marines is so bad that price reductions aren't helping.

I suspect that publishers would love to be able to kill used games and maintain current pricing strategies, but I just don't think it'll work for them. Video game sales are too price elastic and, like you said, for people who would ordinarily buy new at $60 and resell at $30, their video gaming budget would only buy half the games it used to. These people would be more likely to wait until the games were $30.

In a worst-case scenario, if publishers persisted with that strategy, other forms of entertainment may be seen as more appealing and money might disappear from the video games industry.

Like you've said, the free market would take care of it, and I think used games are standing in the way of that being able to happen while allowing maximum compensation for the developers.