Preowned - It's Killing The Industry!!!

[NecroMorrius]

Haha, so pointless.

[Josh128]

Preowned definitely does not benefit the publishers/developers, but theres certainly nothing wrong with it, and its not "stealing". I dont recall any fine print on games packages saying its illegal to sell your game to someone else if you want to -- and furthermore, many people sell or trade in old games to purchase new ones!

The problem with developers/publishers going out of business is market saturation, not preowned games. There are simply way more games being produced today than there are people snapping them up. Its unbelieveable. There are too many platforms to support. You have 3 home consoles + PC + iPad and you have 2 dedicated handhelds (more coming soon) + Android and + iPhone. There are TONS of games being produced for all-- and its very hard to make a product stand out. THATS the real reason so many developers are folding. The budget and team necessary to create a big name game like COD, Zelda, or RDR is simply too big for most developers - if a smaller development house invests the time and money needed to produce a game with similar production levels, and it sells poorly, its door closing time.

To me, market saturation and big budget production games dominating sales are far greater obstacles to upstarts than used games. Look at Red Steel 2 for Wii- Ubisoft put a lot of effort into that game, which by all accounts was a pretty darn good game, and it bombed (basically). Reading the developers comments in an interview about the games sales almost brought a tear to my eye, really.

Back OT though, the only ways to eliminate the "problem" of pre-owned game sales are:

1.) Make it illegal to sell you games/discs/cartridges and include some kind of protection on them to prevent them from playing on more than 1 unique system (like Microsoft does with Windows), which is completely lame and a total about turn from the past 35 years of gaming.

2.) Every game produced goes the way of Steam, digital distribution, albeit with even more restrictions/protections to prevent games from being played on other units. (even more bogus than #1).

Neither will work, in my opinion. If either becomes the norm, I'm out.