by TheGarrison89 » Mon Mar 28, 2011 5:34 am
I agree that piracy hurts the developers quite a bit regarding modern games/systems, but another silent assassin are used game sales. I am not against used game sales, nor do I believe that they should be stopped, however once a store purchases a game used and sells it again to another customer, that is one less new copy that the developer could have sold. Used games definitely have their place, but big stores can hurt developers in the long run.
I have worked at Gamestop for 3 years now and can say that even when a game has been out for a week, we get used copies and sell those within the hour. Games like Halo Reach, Homefront, all of the Call of Duty's, and basically and new game new sales are hurt by used sales quite a bit. The developers do not see any of this money, and there have been times where I have seen the game disk sold more than 3 times! Developers have recently begun to fight back against this, with games like Medal of Honor, Homefront and a few others severely restricting gameplay unless you enter a code. There are also games like Madden 2011 that disallow gameplay online without the code, forcing you to buy a new copy or a replacement code($5 USD).
I am not saying to stop going to big games stores who focus on used games, rather to think of the developer when deciding to pick up a new or used copy. Your $5 saved is their $50+ lost.
Also if lots of people pirate games, that means there will be fewer collector cartages/disks later on down the road! Imagine a world where everyone could have downloaded their NES games easily back in the late 80's. There would be A LOT fewer NES cartages and coverarts, NOT a world I want to live in!!