Last week saw EA take a bold move in the war against pre-owned game sales, as the company announced its plans to charge pre-owned gamers extra to play online, and in a sign of what's to come, THQ today followed suit with a similar announcement of their own.
For UFC Undisputed 2010 - the beat 'em up game based on the incredibly popular Mixed Martial Arts franchise, that's scheduled for release next Friday, players will be required to input a special, one use only code in order to play online - a code that comes bundled with new copies of the game, or, if you buy the game second hand, will have to be purchased for what we're expecting to be 400 Microsoft Points, or around £3.40.
We've detailed before the difficulty that the pre-owned market creates for publishers, but we're still not convinced that this is the right approach to take. As we saw recently, when Game were taken to court when a customer bought a pre-owned game that didn't include the advertised downloadable extras, ideas like this simply seems to confuse the consumer.
Without an agreement from the retailers to lower the "brand new" price of games, and have them follow a natural course of devaluation, as they should naturally do (rather than keeping them at an inflated price to make the pre-owned games look more appealing), all we can see this leading to is the retailers even more stubbornly keeping the brand new copies at an inflated price.
And if that happens, the main person who'll be losing out is the one who's simply caught in the crossfire between the two big dogs. The consumer.
