precipitate8: The amazing amount of diversity and sophistication we currently see in the gaming market today, compared to what it was 30 years ago, is a direct result of the enormous capitalization made available by consumers to fund that growth.
And somehow came about with used game sales in full force, which shouldn't have happened according to you.
precipitate8: That's how capitalism works, and it works really well most of the time. You incentivize innovation by the opportunity to accumulate wealth. Capitalism tends to break down, or at least become less efficient, when instead of rewarding innovators (publishers and developers) we reward people who simply stand in the way of transactions, based on the innovations of others (used game sales).
Which ignores the fact that a thriving second market drives a larger first-sale market. After all there can only be a huge number of copies sold on the second hand market if there were a lot of copies sold in the first-sale market and the ability to recoup some expenses for the person selling their copy allows them to buy more brand new games. Strong sales in the time frame are the most crucial for a game publisher and both previous second hand sales and the knowledge that a game can be sold second hand can help drive those important sales.
precipitate8: But it's good for consumers too. The 'market' recognizes that there are a substantial amount of people who will not pay $60 per game, but will pay $5 or $10 per game. For consoles, that market is currently being served by used game vendors. It's not that the publishers want to destroy that market, they just want to reap the rewards of it. So the people currently buying used games will just be served by a different vendor while receiving a similar deal. This puts more of the money from that market into the hands of the innovators, rather than middlemen, which then helps fund the growth and advancement of the games industry (which necessarily includes the accumulation of wealth for innovators in the industry). Low budget gaming will not be harmed by this change.
Now, people who borrow games, pirate games, steal games, etc....those people will be harmed by this change. But those people aren't consumers; and you're right, the corporations don't care about non-consumers.
Fundamentally, though, this change will be market driven. If the primary market truly cannot serve the current second-hand market, then the industry will adapt or suffer. We already have evidence from the PC games market that adaptation is realizable.
Not everything is market driven and not everything market driven is good for the overall health of the market itself - i.e. one can maximize short term profits at the expensive of long term growth. Over the short term the market drives itself in a particular direction up hill ... and then off a cliff.
Now obviously with purely digital media one should probably draw a distinction between DRM and DRM-free merchandise. By the nature of how a purely digital transaction works, wherein one copies the product then deletes it, with a DRM-free the seller has no guarantee that ownership was transferred rather than copied. But if a seller has DRM control, especially account base DRM control, then one has by virtue of that system ensured that ownership has been transferred - at least as much as would be the case for transference of a physical item. At that point, just like with physical merchandise (which much of the console AND PC markets still are), consumers have a right guaranteed by law to resell the products they have bought. And the game publishers emphatically do not have the right to change that regardless of the effect on short term profitability. They do have the right to offer their own services to compete against eBay, Amazon, Gamestop, etc ... They do not have the right to kill the used game market as much as they might argue otherwise.
