This thread is becoming a train wreck... Anyway, moving on from the other issues:
Trade in values have been plummeting and I don't really understand why people think trading in 5 games for $75-100 credit (if you are lucky) is a good deal when you paid $300+ out of pocket for them.
Where I find value is like the NewEgg sale yesterday Max Payne 3 for $10 or the Black Friday sales or a decent Gold Box sale. Not in the used game market.
But you see, who's to say you didn't
originally get those games for Newegg $10 or less prices, and then, when you were done with them, traded them to GS (or sold them or whatever)? To me, that is the way to maximize being a CAG. Hell, if you do it right, you can actually
make some money back in the process - imagine that! Just look at your example above - in general, I'd be thrilled with $75-$100 trade-in credit for 5 games. Why? Precisely because I did
not pay $300+ for them. That is in general terms of course. There are other times when I do buy $60 games (using my trade-in credit of course - never,
ever cash) and then either I hold on to them a long time and they are worth much less so getting $10 for them is all you can get. Or other times I try to sell them right away (dmaul's method) to recoup most of the initial cost.
Also not sure what you mean by "trade in values have been plummeting". Yeah, sure, on Amazon they have. But they are pretty much the same as they've ever been at GS and with their frequent promos you just have to pick and choose what to trade in when.
I'm about to take my 5th or 6th set of 7 games in for their extra $35 promo. I've been averaging about $10 per game with that, which is pretty good for stuff that is otherwise simply taking up space.
In any case, it looks like we'll still be able to do that with X1 games, so I'm still not sure why Gamestop and used games are brought up at all in this thread to defend the DRM policies. It remains to be seen if X1 games get less value at GS because of the lack of competition from users selling their own games. If they don't plummet from that, we can probably thank the PS4's more open market for that (trade-in values and sales prices of used games will need to be pretty equivalent for PS4 vs. X1 at Gamestop). But I think it will be interesting to see how that all plays out.
Once again I'll stress that the way to take care of used games and the secondary market in general is to provide incentives to purchase digital versions. Microsoft could be on to something with the 10-person gamesharing. Sony is already on to something with PS+ and its freebies and sales (I just bought PSASBR digitally for $14). We'll see how that all plays out over the next year or two as well. I just prefer Sony's method because it doesn't also preclude allowing me to do whatever the hell I want with the discs I buy.
