Story is just as important as gameplay. Its not the days of 30 min long platformers and puzzle games anymore.
I am definitely an old fogey (the insanely old age of 26) but part of me just wants a game with two dinosaurs beating each other up.
But the movie video games are the natural progression. And they are damn good. I've said it before, but Final Fantasy 13 is one of my favorite movies.
And honestly, EA and other publishers are probably losing money. let's try some back of the envelope calculations and try to Carl Sagan this mother. The fact that they made 15 million from online passes in its first year means that at least 1.5 million used purchases were made of their games. What fraction of those people would buy it new if not for used games? Let's say one-fifth. Seems reasonable to me. Now the game would not cost $50 for all of those purchases. But let's assume an average of $35. This is the midpoint of $20 and $50. That means possible lost sales are somewhere around 35 * .3 million = 10.5 million. This is also not counting the people who would purchase a game who did not buy online passes. So, that 10.5 million is probably low. It also doesn't count forces in the other direction. New games are usually purchased with seemingly artificial money from trade ins. This creates a rather fascinating economy existing only in gaming... but I don't imagine this force being too powerful.
The bottom line is, they are losing some money through used games. But that is part of the business. And sometimes you can alter yourself out of the business itself if you try to control the invisible hand of economics too much.
EDIT: I find it interesting that my low-end figure of 10.5 million is at the low-end of EAs range of 10-15 million sales. This makes me think that the person at EA doing cost analysis actually did the cost analysis and did not just say $10 per pass randomly. It also makes the mathematician in me happy. Thank you Fermi, Feynman, and Sagan!
