Quote Originally Posted by Damaniel View Post
I totally disagree with technology that makes games harder to resell, but I do understand the frustration of the development studios (there *are* other studios besides EA out there). Gamestop is strongly eating into their profits - if a single copy of a game gets sold 10 times at Gamestop, the developer makes money once and Gamestop makes money 10 times. That hardly seems fair - Gamestop is just serving as a bloated middleman, and plenty of people are more than happy to throw game studios under the bus to save $5 on a game (after 'selling' some other game back to Gamestop for a fraction of what they originally paid).

Like I said previously, this patent really isn't going to go anywhere. It's probably as much defensive as anything else, preventing Nintendo or Microsoft from doing something similar without paying license fees. In a perfect world, if there were a way to preserve first sale doctrine and cut Gamestop down to size, then I'd be all for that.
Used games have been around for eons, and it didn't used to be such a big issue. Sure, used games weren't exactly big in the 80s, but they've been big for quite a while. We weren't having these discussions 10-12 years ago. Why is that? Is it just because Gamestop has emerged as the only major chain dealing in used games, after mergers and closures, allowing them to be seen as the sole face of used game sales, and therefore some kind of bogeyman?

Frankly, I don't give a shit if Gamestop is eating into their profits. I'm a consumer, not a shareholder. Put out something that makes me want to buy it, and I will do so. Dicking around with blocking used sales makes me want to buy your product less, not more. I don't really care what's "fair", either. That's not really any of my concern, or anyone else's who's not in the industry. We're not going to gather 'round all the game companies, sing Kumbaya, and evenly distribute our money.