This article is great:
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/08/used-games/
Nintendo saw this problem coming long ago in Japan and took action. First, it aggressively moved towards producing software with smaller development budgets that it could sell at lower price points — price points that it could maintain throughout the lifetime of the software without having to slash the price later. It attempted to develop games that would be sticky over long periods of time, so that users wouldn’t want to sell them. And most notably it established Club Nintendo, a loyalty program that rewards purchases of new games with cool prizes.
Lower prices, better games, free stuff. Contrast this with everybody else’s plan: higher prices, chopped-up games, less stuff than you used to get.
Are the game industry’s sales woes the fault of jerkface used games buyers peeing in the pool and causing every game publisher not named Nintendo or Activision Blizzard to lose money?
Or is it that not enough people want the games that they’re making for the price at which they’re trying to sell them?
If it’s the latter, then the games business is broken, and attempting to fix the used-games problem while ignoring the root cause would be like putting a Band-Aid on a tumor.
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