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It may be the first you've heard of it, but it's nothing new. Lorne Lanning was talking about how detrimental pre-owned games are to developers back in 2006. The problem isn't greed on the devs' part, it's the greed on the retailers' part, making more and more profit while the makers of the product don't benefit at all.
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The problem with this is that a) retailers are a big avenue of sales for publishers/developers, so attacking their main source of profit could have detrimental effects, and b) publishers’ solutions are usually expensive, frustrating or irritating to consumers and ultimately don’t help (DRM, day-one DLC, online passes).
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As far as I'm concerned (for whatever that's worth), you do own a copy of the game. However, you have no distribution rights to it. Reselling it is in violation of that. You could argue that it's never cropped up in any other medium before (books, for instance), and for all I know that could be the case. But it probably has, it's just that no retailer has ever pushed reselling so aggressively as in the videogame industry that it's become a huge industry-wide problem.
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I think distribution rights and resale rights should be considered differently. In one, you’re keeping your own copy and allowing someone else access, which is a violation of your license agreement or whatever. In the other, you are transferring your license to another person and giving up your own license, which should be fine.
I think a big worry with digital distribution is how that transfer of license is impossible, and how restrictive the license agreement is. You buy a digital game, it gets tied to one account, one platform, one player.
It seems to me that game publishers and developers get worried about their losses from used sales, but they don’t consider how inconvenient their anti-uesd methods get.