But think about it: if you were to work tirelessly for months and months creating a game, then finally you release it to the mass market, only to discover that only a small portion of the people buying your game are buying it new, then basically it means most people are paying someone else instead of you for the product you made. It just doesn't make any sense. If you're the kind of person who gains satisfaction just knowing that thousands of people are using and enjoying your product, then I guess it's a non-issue. But in most cases, the idea is to get paid for your work.
Lots of people worked tirelessly to design the car you bought used from a guy down the street too. Why do video games get an exception? Buying used CDs from FYE and Amazon and eBay hasn't killed the music industry yet, even with how much more prevalent piracy is in music (especially considering most CDs don't even try to stop you from copying them).
One reason that the music industry is still around in a post-digital age is because artists are increasingly getting the majority of their revenues from live performances. They could have just kept on fighting a losing battle against pirates with more and more restrictive DRM, but it wasn't until they switched to a solution focused on making consumers happy that they could have ever eked out more than a stalemate. Video game developers and publishers can clamor for restrictions on selling used games if they want, but I think the ones who instead come up with a solution that makes people happy when they do what developers and publishers want, rather than trying to **** off their customers -- who are, in a sense, their employers -- until they conform to the way they want them to be, will be much more successful. For example, one possible solution (for some genres) would be to make the game worthwhile enough that the player actually wants to keep it. Maybe one reason there's such a big market for selling back games is because they've become such disposable experiences (obviously this wouldn't work for all genres -- an Ace Attorney game is always going to have less replay value than an F-Zero game -- but it's something to keep in mind).
I believe there are a few solutions to the used game problem, possibly the easiest of which is going full digital distribution. Ignoring piracy, which plagues every entertainment industry, I can see no downside to this solution.
Even discounting (for obvious reasons) the ability to sell your games back to a store or to a friend or someone on Craigslist (which is a significant portion of the value for many people), how about transferring all your games when you get a 3DS Lite? Or when you buy a second 3DS Lite for the color but still like the original color too and use both of them depending on the mood you're in that day? What about lending games to friends (in terms that developers and publishers might like better:
free advertising)? Or passing games down to younger siblings? What about the millions of people in flyover country who aren't going to be getting high-speed access any time soon (the video game industry in 2010 cannot afford to entirely remove vast swathes of demographics from their market) -- or alternatively, assuming every single one of those people gets high-speed access, what about the massive new stresses that would be placed on infrastructure just from adding all those people (let alone that using those connections to download 20 GB games), the huge costs of which could end up pushing out smaller publishers and creating even worse oligopolies than we have now? What about people who don't want or aren't old enough to get credit cards, and don't live nearby a store that sells points cards? What if changes are made to a game after it's released, say for censorship purposes, and you want to play the original? What if the developer loses the rights to a game or just doesn't care about it anymore and you can't download it anymore -- and what if that also deletes it off of your system?
For the hardcore market, most of these aren't major issues, but the hardcore market is an increasingly tiny, unsustainable niche out of a huge market. But even if you only care about the hardcore market, one word: importing. No Japan-only games ever again... unless you pirate them. Don't discount the impact of imports. Without the ability to import games, Elite Beat Agents would not exist (and Ouendan 2 might not either). And also don't discount the importance of piracy. Piracy would skyrocket in a digital distribution-only world, quite possibly enough to wipe out any gains you'd get from eliminating the used game market.
I won't go into a full-on romanticist lament for the experience of having actual discs and cartridges, but it still stands that most people are not going to go for the complete elimination of physical media. I think one reason so many are willing to opt into digital-only for music (and the opting-in is a big part of that -- there's still a big market for CDs and vinyls, and the option is still offered to those who want it) is because of how easy it is to back up your music collection on a hard drive, transfer it to a new computer, and maybe rip some songs off of YouTube once in a while. Video games feel insecure enough already without the ability to make backup copies (a right that fair use laws seem to strongly imply we're supposed to have), but at least now you know your cartridge or disc isn't just going to disappear overnight at the whims of the publishers. You might lose it, or someone might step on it, but if that happens, it's your fault. If the publisher decides to stop letting you play it because they don't like the way you're using it or because they lost distribution rights to it or whatever, that removes any feeling of ownership the consumer may have had, which can majorly impact the value -- meaning you'd have to lower prices anyway.