The problem with the anti-used crowd is that they're morons. My favorite piece of rhetoric is when they claim that games are the only medium that is practically brand new when bought used. This is, I suppose oppose to movies and music which change as they are passed from person to person, or books who's stories degrade every time they're resold. No, wait, all entertainment continues to be entertainment forever and is absolutely not like some fucking vehicle. In fact, books can survive in the right environments for thousands of years, while the glue in CDs will come loose regardless and hard drives will fail.
Even a baby can understand that when you give an object to someone else, you are unable to use it until you get it back. If a person buys a game, then resells it, and gamestop sells it to someone else, and that other person plays it, it is essentially like the first person is still using it. The first person don't keep a "phantom copy" that they can still use.
If publishers and developers want people to buy their shit, they need to stop making their shit so shitty. $60 for six fucking hours of blowing the heads off of polygons with crappy AI? In the good old days, we'd pay $60 for a massive, replayable adventure that we could talk to our friends about. The entire gaming market would fucking crash if publishers were allowed to outlaw used game sales. Gamestop wouldn't bother with a markup of a couple of bucks, and gamers sure as hell wouldn't want to be stuck with some expensive fly-by-night trendy piece of sparkling crap that is only somewhat fun for like a week.
None of this shit matters because all of these crappy games won't be remembered anyways. They won't be remembered because they were crap, and it will be impossible to remember them even if some sick moron wanted to because the online activation servers will have been taken offline long ago.
Penny Arcade:
"I honestly can't figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy"
Because if someone buys a game and another person pirates it, there are two copies, while if the former sells it to the latter there is only one copy and the former needs to buy a new copy if he wants to own it again? Do people still give a fuck about what you say after you've shamelessly whored yourself out to the industry?
"you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things"
How is that shit fun? Consume? You don't fucking "consume" good entertainment. You enjoy it. I don't take a trip to Paris and say I consumed the artwork in the Louvre like I'm some kind of snobby shark. You consume crap. I quickly eat junk food for a snack. I'll listen to a bunch of recent pop music and then discard the YouTube links because I wanted a quick, stupid Katy Perry fix. I didn't consume Darklands, I sat through and enjoyed it. I didn't rush through Monkey Island and then throw the disks out the window. They're talking like these games are like those crappy flash games I used to run through in high school programming class to kill time because my teacher was the fucking football coach and spent the entire period jacking off under his desk. Seriously, why do people fucking buy all these games and rush through them? Even if they were masterpieces it would be stupid. You don't see people buying (or borrowing from a library LOLZ) a ton of classic novels and then speedreading them just so they can say they read them. People don't run around the Louvre like it's some kind of fucking achievement just to step foot in the place.
If sounds like Gabe and Tycho stupidly threw hundreds (thousands?) of dollars away buying and selling games to Gamestop, who's entire business is build around people being stupid enough to do this repeatedly and ripping them off. It's not "free money" because THEY RIPPED YOU OFF BIG TIME ON EVERY USED PURCHASE YOU MADE AND EVERY USED GAME THAT YOU SOLD. They should have either rented the games from blockbuster or, I dunno, bought a few good games that lasted a long time. Of course that doesn't get you years of comic worthy material. That's not really something they have to worry about because their comics could be written after a cursory glance at the latest IGN headlines.
Vogel said the right stuff but like always his observations are completely pointless and apparent to anyone with half a brain and he offers no solutions.
