As gamers, and more importantly as consumers, our moral compasses are being tested at the moment. While we happily stroll up to the counter to legally purchase a used game from a high street retailer to play on our legally purchased consoles, with, in the case of one system, paid premium online service, industry bigwigs are pounding on their fancy glass tables now flecked with their own saliva drooling from their rage filled and money hungry lips.

Second hand sales go straight into the hands of the retailer, not the publishers. That means to the men in suits, most notably this week EA, THQ and Ubisoft, if you buy a used game you're no better than a filthy stealing pirate. Shame on you!

Shame on me, then. I probably buy about six new games a year, and a significantly larger number used.  I understand that publishers and developers are perhaps unfairly losing out on my Yen. At the same time, though, I don't consider myself a pirate or a thief. On a basic moral level, I'm spending money on goods and legitimately feeding cash into the economy at large. The creators of my chosen game made at least some dough off the initial sale, and more significantly. I deem it my form of protest at game prices- I'll feed my money to some aspect of the industry, but if EA (or whomever) themselves want my cash, they'll have to stop charging exorbitant prices.

The 'waah, it's too expensive!' argument is of course a frequently held view amongst pirates. 'If it were cheaper, I'd buy it'. I meet that sort of pro piracy argument with some distrust, since history deems it to be untrue. In the 80s and 90s, home computer games were pirated with gleeful abandon despite their pocket friendly prices. Fast forward to today, and 'set your own price' campaigns for games like World of Goo and the Humble Indie Bundle on PC have seen an alarmingly high number of people choosing to pay nothing, effectively electing to steal a game they could buy for 1 cent/penny/Yen/whatever. 

I, on the other hand, never pirated any Amiga games back in the day (hard to believe, but true) while publishers and developers saw some of my cash thanks to extensive discounts on older games through special budget labels. If I wanted to buy a game from four years previously, I had no problems buying it new since it was a quarter of the price of a game that came out two years ago. Today, if I went into my local games shop and looked at the new racks, I'd see Left for Dead (2008) at the same 2,940 Yen 'budget' price point as Earth Defence Force (2006). Eh? That justifies skipping to the used section in my book, though I'll leave it to you, Mr/Ms. Reader, to condemn me to hell or not.

2,940

2,940. Huh?

 The western publishers' big initiative to get some money from used sales is through online passes. EA, not content with alienating those who, early adopters or not, are content with having sports titles that aren't completely up to date by turning off their servers after a year, now expect players to fork out 800 Microsoft points or the equivalent to play online if they commited the cardinal sin of not buying the game new. THq are doing similar with UFC 2010, and Ubisoft are 'interested'.

Will it pay off? Possibly. From the publisher's perspective they can at least get some dough from  a second hand sale, though I'd argue sports games players who buy second hand are usually buying titles that are at least a year out of date and as such aren't bothered about online multiplayer. Will it align that moral compass of a hypothetical gamer who buys used, but feels so gosh darned guilty about it afterward? No, or it shouldn't. That cash from the online pass code isn't going to the little man who made your game, it's going on Peter Moore's new tattoo (did he get his Halo one removed? Or hastily changed to FIFA on leaving Microsoft for EA? the 'lo' could be a ten, and you could change the H to an F and add a couple of letters. But anyway). Like a good compromise, nobody will be happy.

The bigwigs would be at their most chuffed, of course, if they banned second hand sales outright, something that very nearly happened here in Japan in 2001. Not content with curb stomping game rentals in the 90s, a ban still enforced today, a group of publishers headed up by the likes of Capcom and Konami lobbied for a halt on used games sales, accompanied by all games boxes printed with a stern 'NO RESALE!' warning on the back .

In the minds of prominent figures in the industry, disappointing financial results and slow sales were more to do with second hand sales rather than increasing apathy to uninspired titles, a steady tansition to new hardware or the fact there was a huge recession on. The lobbying failed. Today, despite Capcom creative director Keiji Inafune's often expounded belief the Japanese games industry is creatively dead, it is economically fairly kicking, touting seven games selling over one million units in 2009 compared to five in 2001, a year headed up by Final Fantasy X at 2.4 million compared to 2009's Dragon Quest 9 at a staggering 4.1 million.

Why the bigger numbers? You could partly hold the Wii and DS' success accountable, though PS2 and Game Boy were pretty prominent at the turn of the century themselves. Economy? We're in a recession again, times are tough. Second hand sales are still present, too, but those new release sales figures might just have something to do with price.

A brand new game in Japan retails at around 6-7 thousand Yen, a figure that's... Been largely the same for the last fifteen years.  With games offering the expericnces they do now, it's arguable that they're a better value proposition than ten years ago. Compare and contrast with US prices creeping toward the seventy Dollar mark, and it comes as no great surprise people want to wait for games to hit used racks.

So my advice to the industry (for what it's worth, granted)? Hold your high horses, stop villainising potential customers, and for heaven's sake, even if you're not going to make games cheaper (though I'd love a super cheap option for ancient titles, especially now hardware life cycles are growing longer), don't make your titles any more expensive than they already are.

(Sales numbers from vgchartz.com)