It's always more attractive to pay less, which is why GameStop's used games business has seen so much success, especially so in a downed economy. Nintendo CEO and president Satoru Iwata recently told investors (via GamePolitics) that the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the people making the games.
"If it were illegal acts like piracies, we could criticize them," said Iwata. "But, however hard we may express our concern about the secondhand market, as long as they are not illegal, it does not do us any good. With video games, because people do not see much deterioration in the quality when they purchase as secondhand, it may give publishers a hard time if the used product market grows."
"When you ask me how we will cope with this issue specifically," he continued, "our answer is that Nintendo must continuously craft ideas so that our consumers will feel like owning the purchased products or think about how to motivate the customers to purchase new products instead of used ones."
Game makers experimented with different ways to cope with used games, from joking about locking away content from folks who purchase used versions to providing plenty of downloadable content (see: Fallout 3) to keep people playing and paying after they've bought the game.
I wonder how many Wii users are purchasing used, though. We're to assume that because their habits are less hardcore, maybe they aren't buying their games at GameStop and, thus, not having the opportunity to purchase used as often.
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