Divus Masterei said:
Then the industry needs to start considering viable responses to this so-called 'threat', ones that don't involve circumventing personal property rights because they happen to be inconvenient.
Those in the industry need to stop living in a state of denial. There's a reason why used game sales are so strong in the US, and it's not because of the incredible sales talents of your average EB/Gamestop counterboy. What it comes down to is that most games just don't offer enough repeat play value to justify a $50+ price tag. Not for a title that the average person is going to play for a week, beat, then put aside and not look at again for months or years (or at all). Yet the industry in its infinite wisdom has decreed that the solution to this problem is to not only increase prices by $10 per title, but make it impossible for people to recover anything on their investment after they're done, while continuing to crank out the very same linear games that helped create the recycling trend in the first place.
Instead of trying to do an end-run around what consumers rightfully expect of their personal property (namely, the ability to lend it, resell it, or give it to another person as a gift if they so wish), companies ought to start seriously looking at lowering prices, developing more games that have long-term repeat play value (whether through multiplayer elements, open-ended gameplay, easy moddability, random playfield generation, or what have you - there's space to explore here), or some combination of the two.
