Publishers hate used game sales. It's hard to get anyone in the industry to talk about that hate on the record, but it's there. You can see it in the eyes of interview subjects, in the terse syllables of the "no comment" when it's brought up, or in the rantings of the few who will come out and admit to the feeling. Nintendo is the latest company to step into the fight against used games by blocking the sales of its Wii Speak peripheral on the secondary market. Be warned: this is certainly but the first move in what promises to be an all-out assault on the used game market.

MTV Multiplayer has received its press copy of Animal Crossing City Folk, along with the Wii Speak peripheral. The package came with a surprise: a 16-character code is needed to download the Wii Speak channel from Nintendo. The fine print is clear: the code will not be replaced if lost. There is no other way to download the channel. Without the channel, the Wii Speak hardware is just a useless microphone. Anyone buying the hardware secondhand will be out of luck when it comes to getting the channel allowing the hardware to work. Crafty!

This sort of thing is becoming increasingly common. Gamers who purchase Gears of War 2 are given a download code for five classic maps from the first game to play online. The codes are one-use only, so anyone buying the game used has no way of getting the maps, which is no fun if they're in the rotation and you're forced to sit out a round while your friends play. The story is that Epic won't be selling the maps as downloadable content and, while that's subject to change, it might be worth more to the company to keep them as an incentive for players to bypass the $5 savings at GameStop and pick up the new copy.

Even Rock Band 2 came with a code that allowed new buyers to receive 20 more songs for the game for free. The track list isn't filled with well-known tracks, but who wouldn't want to pay a little more for a new copy if there was a promise of more tracks coming with the game? This is content that adds value to the game, and is being held back for the specific purpose of cutting down the used-game market.

Creating video games is a tough business. There's tremendous expense involved, you have tough competition, gamers have an increasingly limited budget, and retailers have limited shelf space. If you don't have a big opening weekend or a solid first month, your product will often be pulled from the shelves, and there aren't many secondary ways to profit from your game. It's not like the movie busines where a film is shown in theaters, then sold on DVD, sold to cable channels, sold online, and eventually aired on network television. There are multiple ways to make money from a movie. Games? You have one shot at making your nut, and that's even tougher when specialty retailers give used titles much more shelf space than new games, not to mention the fact that employees are trained to push the high-margin used titles to gamers.

Nintendo may be one of the first companies to fight this battle on the hardware front instead of via software, but it won't be the last. Epic Games President Michael Capps spoke candidly on the subject to GamesIndustry, and he made it clear: used games hurt publishers. "We certainly have a rule at Epic that we don't buy any used games—sure as hell you're not going to be recognized as an Epic artist going in and buying used videogames—because this is how we make our money and how all our friends in the industry make money."

These moves make financial sense for the developers and publishers, but it's a mixed bag at best for gamers. Clamping down on used game sales may result in more new titles, but gamers can expect an increasingly hard time reselling their old titles and, possibly, their peripherals.