1. Your Base Feels Cheated Enough As It Is
Ultimately, this is the big reason to keep Used Games and Backwards Compatibility in play: it keeps the gamers happy. Among the past decisions that have made gamers feel like they've been cheated were such winners as aggressive marketing of DLCs/in-game purchases, rushing games onto the market with the notion that "a patch'll solve everything", and raising prices every so often, just to keep things interesting. Now while some of these aren't as bad as the market make them out to be (DLCs add quite a bit of extra value to a game you could beat in hours, and price hikes do come with the territories of expanding programming skills and capabilities), some of them are quite ridiculous. Purchasing in game money with real money, or purchasing any specific parts with real money, will never (at least, not in my eyes) make any sense whatsoever. So you want us to buy a game, and buy a DLC a couple months down the road, but in the meantime you're releasing guns, camos, and even in the case of The Sims - IKEA Furniure that we can spend actual money on? Not to mention there was that time where we waited and waited and waited for a new game, based on a well beloved geek property, that sucked because of reasons unbeknownst to us just yet...and there's STILL a couple DLCs waiting down the line. You made people pay for a game that sucked, and now there's more possible suck to be paying for on top of the initial suck. If you think people are really going to do that, well...you suck. The video game industry is a tricky place, but I think there's a Goldilocks scenario out there that'll please gamers and companies alike. If we really put our minds to finding a solution, we could find and implement it no problem. Or, if things don't shake out the way we want and both support features mentioned are dropped, perhaps we can just go back to those retro consoles and stall out the gaming industry. Or, we could all just buy PC's. Basically, console makers need to realize that if they don't change their game, they aren't the only one in town for people to go to.
There you have it, What Culture Republic! What say you? Are Used Games just asking for trouble? Is Backwards Compatibility a pipe dream? Does anyone else want to resurrect Sega through a Kickstarter campaign to get the Dreamcast 2 made? Leave your comments below.