Frankly, I'm amazed that it's taken this long to get to this point. Published have been complaining about their perceived losses due to the second hand market for years, something which is even more concrete when they're incurring real costs by running servers for those second-hand owners.
If I was an EA stockholder, I'd be applauding this as a very smart business decision.
Ultimately, the only one that loses is Gamestop. This will force them to drop the cost of a second hand EA game (and thus reduce their margin on that sale), otherwise the value-proposition for the potential customer on a second hand game is off, and customers will simply buy new instead.
Of course, there's a knock on effect to the customer who buys new and subsequently wants to trade in, as Gamestop will no doubt pay less for a trade-in on these EA Sports titles in order to maintain as much of a margin as they can. But, as ever, the onus is on the consumer to be educated, and weight that knowledge in their decision to purchase a title.
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If I was an EA stockholder, I'd be applauding this as a very smart business decision.
Ultimately, the only one that loses is Gamestop. This will force them to drop the cost of a second hand EA game (and thus reduce their margin on that sale), otherwise the value-proposition for the potential customer on a second hand game is off, and customers will simply buy new instead.
Of course, there's a knock on effect to the customer who buys new and subsequently wants to trade in, as Gamestop will no doubt pay less for a trade-in on these EA Sports titles in order to maintain as much of a margin as they can. But, as ever, the onus is on the consumer to be educated, and weight that knowledge in their decision to purchase a title.