@ guitar smasher & soren
I pretty much agree with your statements about GS and the used-game market.
I don't know how CB can say "vote with your dollar" and then cry when gamers, who have "voted with their dollars", turn around and want some of those dollars back. Hey, guess what someone selling a game back to the store is? "I don't want to keep this game or play it ever again." Sounds like a pretty reasonable vote. CB just doesn't want to hear it, which seems oddly hypocritical. Maybe the industry should focus more on making games people want to keep, since there is a secondary market that thrives because the industry does make so many games people just never want to touch again, instead of crying about it all the time?
If continuous DLC and transactions are the way to keep gamers from selling THIER games, or "voting with their dollars," as Cliffy encourages, how can he then claim that games are cheaper now then they've ever been? Especially when sequels, most often, resemble full priced map/cutscene packs which cost $10-$20 a decade ago as opposed to $60 now. If the price of a not-full game is $60 today and the price of a full game from 20 years ago was $50 and you want to pretend that both products are equivalent you could say that games now are cheaper. It's not really true, but it could be in some cases.
As far a development costs go: no one is holding a gun to your head to make $100M games. Also, to suggest that it costs $100M to make games is a flat out lie. Ask Notch how much it cost to make Minecraft or Nintendo how much it cost to make NSMBWii, Wii Fit, Mario Kart... etc. since all those games have sold better than anything ol' cliffy has done. Maybe the industry should focus less on ramping up development costs to make games that people "vote with their dollars" against and start focusing on games people actually want to keep. I enjoyed not playing Gears of War 1/2/3 on my Wii, they system with the cheapest development cost and the largest install base this generation because, "this is an industry" and "business" and "free market" apparently have nothing to do with keeping costs down and selling games to people. All those things really mean is that developers should get to do whatever the **** they want: make games customers hate after a month, increase development costs for no reason, ship incomplete games that need to be patched before people buy them-- and if gamers "vote with their dollars" in a free market, cry about it.