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Should The Used Games Market Be Regulated?

Over they years, how many video games have you amassed? Include your PC games, the games from old video game consoles, games for portable consoles – basically all the games that you have bought. I bet that if you are an avid gamer, you would have more games that you can count.

And what do you do with these games once you are done playing with them? I don’t know about you but many times, my old game CDs just sit there unused. Sometimes, once in a blue moon, I would be enticed to bring one out and play the game again. This is not that often – the only games that get used the most are my absolute favorites.

This brings up the possibility of selling old (or used) video games. There are many reasons for doing so. You might have bought a game which, as it turns out, you don’t really like. You might have gotten sick and tired of a certain game. Whatever the reason for your not using the video game anymore, one good thing to do would be to sell it right?

According to Nick Michetti in an editorial at Kombo:

We also need to rein in the used games market and not with DRM. It is fundamentally unfair that developers are being robbed of profits for work that they’ve done. If the ESA will not offer a mandate, then we’ll need the government to do so. Publishers and developers should be entitled to at least half of the price from the sale of every used game. However, we need for there to be caps on used game prices and a Blue Book system for video games to prevent price gouging.

I am not sure that this makes sense. The developers have already earned money when the game was sold brand new. Why should they take a cut off of whatever second hand games go for?