@McGregor @surferosh I think your last sentence nails the solution on the head. Allow gamers to buy direct from the developers and cut out the middle men distributors. This will allow lower prices, more sales and negate the need for a restriction on used game sales as less people will be buying used.
@Skinon @endouken @surferosh Not in the UK...a garage can have an unregistered car, i.e. no previous owners.
On paper if i walked in to a BMW garage (which are all independents) and bought a new car then I'd be the first buyer, once that car is registered to me it would then be second hand to anyone else. Not sure how it works elsewhere as I've never bought a car anywhere but in Blighty.
Technically though, i think you're right. The independent garages buy the car unregistered so the manufacturer (or game developer) gets full new price. They then sell the car (or game) for whatever they can get away with.
It's the distributors who are being greedy here and their leverage is that they can choose which console to release exclusives on. Unfortunately, I don't think M$ would agree to restrict second hand sales without some major exclusives titles being agreed in the background...meaning it's us the gamers that will lose out; we'll either have to pay the premium or not play blockbuster titles.
@surferosh Because car manufacturers sell a car which (usually) isn't then sold on (at a loss) for 3 years, in which time everyone who was going to buy the car new has done so. With computer games you only have to wait a few weeks to see second hand copies appearing in your local retailer.
I am NOT anti second hand at all, just explaining the warped view of game developers/publishers.
My solution = make the games better! If all games had single player campaigns worth playing (think Skyrim, Ocarina Of Time, FFVII, etc.) rather than the two hour POS we currently get then no one would be selling their copy soon after release, meaning more people will buy new as we can't be bothered to wait.
@burrito_tester Hahahahahahahahahah...the word naive springs to mind. Unless you were using so much sarcasm that your comment performed a 180 and sounded serious.
They should have included a sim card slot so this thing could be a mobile/cell phone with a community creating apps for it (like sms, email, etc etc)...then this device would have more attraction...it would be a gaming phone rather than a phone which plays games. Usual Sony style though; forcing you to use their software and their hardware. I once had a sony mp3 player (many moons ago) and it would only play ATRAC format (sony's own format which is only playable on sony hardware) that converted by entire library of music (some 100+ days of continuous music) to this format and deleted the original files forcing me to also use a sony player on my PC (thank god for backups)...never again sony, never again.
There's a difference?! FFS gamespot, no one cares about such minute graphic differences, these kind of articles are pointless. Now an article of how a PC exclusive title would look on ps3/xbox would be interesting (e.g. crysis 1)
endouken's comments