The problem of “pre-owned games”

Today, while checking up on one of my favorite game franchises, I ran into this article about how Treyarch are going to “defeat” the problem of pre-owned games. For a minute I was under the impression this article was going to be about how difficult it is these days for gamers to trade, swap and resell their old games, but no. It seems the “problem” is not the game itself, but the honest gamer who paid good money to buy the game in the first place.

You see, they still don’t get it. They think that they’re going to lose money when those gamers are able to trade in or swap games, just like you could swap books or DVD’s. Surely that criminal activity must be stopped! I should note that the article itself details how Treyarch is going to handle the “problem” by providing more quality. Uhmm, sure. But between the lines you can read how the industry feels about its consumer base. How long do they think those honest gamers will stay honest? Surely none of them will have the guts to look for a no-cd patch or any other way to circumvent the roadblocks put in place to stop their malicious behavior.

It happened before with DRM on music, and it will happen again with games and tomorrow with ebooks. Copy protection has had and will have zero effect on those who are not willing to fall in line with the publisher’s demands. Instead, it will keep pushing the paying customers away from spending their hard-earned cash.