As Rad said the fact money is being made from the secondhand market is not the game shops fault, that's the way the market works.
If EA and anyone else for that matter wants to change to charging online for secondhand titles I'm fine with that, they keep on providing a service so should make some more money from the new user.
It's make too not recoup, no games company makes a loss on decent game otherwise they would be no industry and they have to provide the online for the people who bought the game the first time round...
On another note how about games that have no online, should they carry a sell on charge?
That's why games like Dragon Age offer $10 (I think it's actually $15?) DLC. It's a genuine reason to buy first hand, not second. Even offline titles have aftersales costs y'know. Similarly there was a company - Stardock I think, who made a game called Galactic Civ 2 and the more recent Sins of a Solar Empire - who made their games playable without a registry key. So you could get it off a torrent site and install it unopposed.
However, you couldn't get access to the online game or community modding - a scene that was pretty huge - so you were strongly encouraged to get a legitimate copy in order to get a lot more out of the game. It'd be kind of like a more extreme version of Konami letting you play PES 5 without a key, but you needed a key to play online or to edit kits.
DVDs offer making ofs, commentaries, trailers, artwork etc to make the main product worth buying as opposed to illegally downloading the title, not just as an advantage over watching the film in the cinema (another source of income games can't draw upon; the closest equivalent to the cinema was the coin-op, but that market has mostly collapsed as it cannot offer an experience that cannot be bettered at home). However a film will stay in the market for several years, even decades, and can be re-released at the same price as the original; I think you'd struggle to find someone who'd buy Final Fantasy VII for £40. Even £8, as on PSN, is pretty steep.
But to make out these multi billion pound games companies are being hard done to because of how the secondhand market has always worked is crazy.
The second hand market for games is based on a time when there weren't running costs after launch. Just because something is longstanding, particularly in such a fast moving industry, doesn't mean to say it is valid or should continue. Not by a long shot Among several other reasons, games cost a lot more to manufacture, on multiple platforms indeed, without necessarily selling more.
This idea of multi billion dollar games companies being invincible or an acceptable victim is thousands of miles off the mark too.
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/05/11/ea-posts-677-million-loss-in-fy2010-alongside-downed-revenues/
http://kotaku.com/5114113/ea-reducing-work-force-by-1000-closing-9-locations
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3171980
http://kotaku.com/5406830/confirmed-ea-closes-pandemic-studios-says-brand-will-live-on
A lot of creative talent out there lose their jobs because their games don't break even. If high profile games like FIFA (which makes up a huge proportion of EA Sports' revenue) can recoup (it
is recoup!!) some of the money lost through the public buying second instead of first hand, then it helps create more of a buffer for this creative talent.
I've run out of steam for the moment so I'll stop soon. It is Friday, after all. But Rad, when you say "EA can't be arsed"(!!!) to buy your games back, can you explain exactly how that system would work? Talk it right through, and think of the costs and logistics involved to set something like this up.
If every console was online to register digitally distributed titles to users, then you would be far better equipped to sell your licence back to a publisher (you all have to stop thinking of the publisher as EA - this is a problem that all publishers will have to deal with and will at some point try something). If it was all electronic, about licences rather than discs, then it wouldn't be that bad. You could rent a game direct from a publisher in theory, in the way you can rent videos from Microsoft or Sony.
Saying that the Retailers are putting their own money up to buy games and selling them at higher cost, therefore they should be exempt from criticism, is precious - whose money are publishers putting on the line to make the games?? Whose jobs are on the line if a game doesn't break even??
