I follow this a bit every once in a while, from various sources, not on the inside of a game developers studio, but instead among their core audience, a male between 16-30.
From a students POV, spending the same 40£ on a bad game is painfully.. shitty and spending 40£ on a good game is
still a lot of money. Which is where places like Gamestop come into the picture as gamers lifesaver. I can see how this is bad for the developers and I've heard the numbers before, numbers that would make any businessman squirm, the profit margin is very low (if my memory is correct only about 4% of pc game releases see profit), so there's no reason a game developer shouldn't feel crossed that these shops turns a buck for what can almost be described as legal pirating.
With that said you are trying to sell a product with it's homebase in the most liberal place on our planet (the internet), to demographic generally not wealthy (people in their 20ies), who's best friend is used. So I sort of feel like going "Seriously, what did you think was gonna happen?".
While I'm all for supporting the industry in buying legal copies, and not selling them on (Because in the end this will just bite the gamers in the ass, when they see their favorite game developer studios close).
Game developers have to realize that they can't treat this market like they do currently and expect money to come flowing (Unless you're Nintendo (
http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos .... _money.gif) but that's more of a console- anyway). The best current idea I think is the MMO strategy (aka constant cash flow, constant development), Steam (the ultimate (cheap) convinience store) or comming up with a form of rental (IE. rent the game through Steam for 2 weeks for half/third of the original price).
