I know you keep doing that in purpose, but GOG and Steam have very little in common. Steam locks pretty much all your games to your account, also when you want to play them (not just download them for the first time).

GOG, on the other hand, is just a delivery service, after which you don't necessarily need to connect to your GOG account ever no matter how many times you reinstall the game etc.

GOG games are not "account based games", period.

Ever tried selling a GOG game?

No, but there are technical restrictions trying to prevent that. Only moral and legal.

Ever tried selling any of your Steam games? Please do, and Steam will ban you from all your Steam games.

That isn't really the issue. The issue is that Steam is an intermediary between you and your game every single time you run the game. If Steam's servers are down and your game doesn't have a working offline mode, you can't play your game. If Steam bans your account, you can't play your game. If GOG's servers go down or you get banned, what happens? Nothing.

The point is, GOG is account based. The difference between GOG and Steam is that GOG simply doesn't enforce it.

(Well, there are plenty of other differences, but within this point I mean)

Maybe I should explain: Account based means the game is tyed to one person and can't be transferred to another person. Licences on physical media can be transferred unless the licence holder explicitly disallowes it.

GOG relies on "goodwill", Steam on "brute force" to ensure this. I prefer GOGs method, of course.

Considering the discussion, I agree that in both services it is not meant that you'd sell any of your games. Just like some physical (non-account) games and applications could possibly have EULA forbidding you to sell it (=the license to use the software) to anyone else later.

That was my first thought.

Oh well, just one more reason to keep me from buying games when they are first released. This type of thing isn't going to encourage people like me to suddenly start shelling out $60 for a title.

Not in the US they don't. Netflix only started using "Rental Copy" discs when they started getting sweetheart deals on the cost. You're free to rent out anything you buy at Walmart in the US with no extra fees. That's how Redbox operated for at least the first year they were in business. Kiosk owners would go buy a stack of the latest release at retail on release day and go stock their Kiosks before Joe Sixpack drove by on the way home from work. It's like the "entitlement generation" that they complain so much about almost works exclusively in their industry. They're the pot calling the kettle black, only I'm not so sure about the kettle, myself.
You seem to be under some sort of delusion that there's a whole mess of folks that keep a game one day and sell it back to Gamestop or whatever the very next. This is so at odds with reality I don't even know where to begin. If there's 100 used games in a store those were 100 new sales, probably many more. Unless the game seriously blows then it doesn't come back the next day. The "over and over again" argument has never been backed up with a single fucking shred of evidence so far as I know. In fact if we could measure it I'd bet the average number of times a used game gets resold is between 1 and 2.

Everyone of those used games represents someone who only bought that game new because they could sell it used. People fled from PC to console when used games on PC became all but impossible and PC gamers bitched and moaned to no end that no one wanted to make games for them. Do you know why? Well, it's you're lucky day, because I'm going to tell you: it's because PC gamers won't pay as much on average for a game because they cannot resell it. Make this happen on consoles too, I dare the industry, watch overall profit plummet overnight and for the long term. I'll fucking laugh for weeks.

Best quote of his article: "In the end, I fully believe that we have to do something about these issues or our industry is going to fall apart."

LMFAO, sure man, your industry is just fucking crumbling to dust. Higher profits than Hollywood with increasing revenue year after year? Yeah, you guys are doing shitty!

It's not about being profitable, it's about being MOAR PROFITABLE! EVERY YEAR! Which is due in part to being publicly traded companies (at least in some instances). Shareholders (those with share levels that actually mean something, not the mom and pop w/100 shares in their IRA) don't care about originality, the customer, or what effect crunch time has on the talent. All they care about is seeing the stock price go up.

However, there is only so much growth an industry can reasonably expect before they begin cannibalizing within that industry.

Let's hope they ban pre-owned houses, clothes etc. as well, and broaden the definition so far that anything you didn't manufacture yourself is "pre-owned". And then the ban applies only to Mr. Durall.

Yep, he's a certified moron.

Oh, for sure, they have to hit the point of diminishing returns at some point. I'll be honest, though, I think people like this developer aren't thinking long term, nor do they have a firm grasp of economics or anything else concerning this actually. They're just really self absorbed, entitled twits. The famous ones get their asses kissed to the point that they start living in an alternate universe like certain people who used to make certain iThings.

They might be passing on the message of someone who does understand this stuff, but nah, they're simply ignorant tools, I doubt one in one hundred gets it.

Why should they? Well because it hurts the industry if they aren't. Keep in mind that retailers often stock very few new copies and then rely on used copies instead and the clerks will encourage you to buy used raher than new. If you go to your local library and borrow a book then the writer/publisher recieves royalty for it and that is what the gaming industry is saying here - give us a piece of the action. When the retailers get rich due to used sales and often place all kind of unfair restrictions on publishers in the first place then none of that benefits the gaming industry ie. gamers or publishers/devs.
I agree that publishers could offer better deals to stop second-hand marked and I hope they will rather than just put in some lock on the new console (that will get bypassed somehow by most users anyway). But we will have so see.

I have to say I strongly disagree with you here. PC gamers tend to have more money than console gamers simply because being a PC gamer require a more expensive system and often PC gamers are older and have a more secure income and console gamers tend to be younger ie. teenagers that don't have as much money and hence have to rely on reselling their games in order to be able to buy new ones (new here doesn't mean "new" but can also mean used). There have never been a strong marked for used games on PC anyway - atleast not here in Denmark but there are plenty of used games on consoles. Console games tend to be short and flashy and usually not the type of game you want to play 5 years from now ergo you can sell it once you beat it. On PC however I love that I can take out my old copy of Starcraft or Baldurs Gate and just play it because they were quality titles.

Look, the reason why I object to second-hand sales are because it is organized to prevent the sale of new titles and instead replace them with used ones and this all happend on pretty much day1. What publishers want is to stop second-hand sales within the first 6-9 months of release because it is there that most games make a profit before huge discounts/sales. After about 9 months or so noone really cares about second hand sales. Higher prices on console games have nothing to do with reselling them but has to do with license rights etc. Are publishers some greedy dirtbags that are often wrong? Yes absolutely but there are times when I wish we gamers would stop thinking about only ourselves and also consider that game companies also need to be taken care off.