What our good friends at Ubi$oft are doing...

[vicinity]

Everybody's talking about the games companies losing money through second hand sales...

What a load of rubbish, where do you think all that extra money people make from reselling those games goes? That's right, most of it goes directly into funding new games sales and the companies end up getting a slice of the pre-owned pie. I'll add that I never trade in or resell any of my games but if I want to bring it round to a friends house or let someone borrow it i'd be prevented from doing so. I don't care if any company believes that to be piracy because it simply isn't true, the same number of copies exist as did before after all.

I'd like to think games companies are only damaging themselves by going down this route but with some of the bigger games (Call of Duty, Battlefield etc.) people would continue to buy them even if they had herpes included in the box. Games retail stores HAVE to sell pre owned games simply because the margins on new games and hardware for them are so low, it is simply not possible to make enough profit for them to continue to open their doors. I suppose it's all rather moot anyway, given that games will be around 100% digital distribution within five years.