Debates over used games aren't entirely about used games, just an uncertain industry looking for an easy villain.

The old back-and-forth over used game sales got kicked off again this week thanks to these comments from THQ creative director Cory Ledesma, per the company's introduction of a one-time use code for online gameplay in its World Wrestling Entertainment games:

I don't think we really care whether used game buyers are upset because new game buyers get everything. So if used game buyers are upset they don't get the online feature set I don't really have much sympathy for them... when the game's bought used we get cheated.

Usually, game developers making these comments tend to gently skirt around the issue of how they feel about people who buy used games, not really wanting to offend anyone. Ledesma has no such reservations, pulling up just short of telling people who buy used games to go eff themselves.

Ledesma's remarks reminded me of a conversation I had at a party a couple of years ago with another rather outspoken game director, who asserted much the same sentiments regarding anyone who purchased used games. In fact, he went a bit further – he didn't see any difference between a used-game purchaser and a pirate, he said, and quite frankly he'd almost rather people just pirate the games versus buying them used.

No, no, I said; that's not right, for a variety of reasons.

First, why (publicly, in Ledesma's case) demonize people who, in contrast to pirates, are doing nothing legally or morally wrong? You have every right to sell property that you own to a second owner, whether that be a videogame or a desk lamp. Moreover, this is property that your company continues to choose to make available without any such restrictions on ownership. If THQ wanted to, it could lock down the whole damned game with a one-time use code; the end.

Secondly, leaving ethics out of it, there's a practical reason to prefer a customer who buys a used game over one who pirates. It's true that none of the former customer's money is going (directly) into your pockets. But his modus operandi of obtaining a new videogame is to walk into the store and pay money for your product. That is, he's already doing almost exactly what you want him to do. All you have to do to convert him into a valued customer is get him to buy the game with a white sticker on it versus the yellow sticker.

Contrast this with a pirate. When this person wants a new game he does not go to the store and pay money; he downloads it at home for free. You have relatively little chance of changing his behavior. The first guy, you've got a real shot at making money off of. This guy, no chance.

Finally, we come to the stickiest, most convoluted part of the equation. The relationship between used and new games is likely a deep and intricate one.

Among GameStop's detractors, there seems to be an unstated belief that, roughly speaking, every used game purchased equates to exactly one new game not purchased. I sincerely doubt it.

At Penny Arcade this week, Tycho – a sharp industry watchdog, but also a maker and seller of videogames – tackled the issue in a news post and comic. In the post, he reasserts the too-simple analysis equating used-game purchases with piracy ("from the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous"). The comic brings back an old favorite character to make the point that those who buy used games are not actually THQ's customers.

Sure, they're not THQ's customers at that particular moment. But maybe they were yesterday, or will be tomorrow.

For the last 15 years or so I've bought a mix of new and used games, using a pretty complex decision matrix. Do I want the game immediately, or can I wait? How much is it? How much are used copies? Are they in good condition? Are they covered in GameStop's horrific yellow diarrhea of stickers? A lot of things can affect that decision, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if I saw research that showed that the average used games buyer also buys a sizable amount of new games.

More than that, as Bill Harris pointed out earlier this week, the used games market fuels new game sales, too. The fact that GameStop buys back new games for store credit surely has a nontrivial impact on new game sales:

Sure, if you want to, you can call the guy who only buys used games a parasite, but what about the guy who sold his copy to get money to buy another new game? What do you call him? You're stopping that guy, too.

The whole piece is worth reading, but Harris' point is that the relationship between used and new games isn't parasitic, it's symbiotic, and to go tinkering with that symbiosis without fully understanding all of the ways in which the businesses are intertwined is to court disaster, taking the chance that you'll leave things far worse than you found them:

Anyone who claims to have an accurate analysis of how the used game market affects the size of the new game market is being disingenuous. Even if the size of the new and used game markets could be established with a remarkable degree of precision, the only way to reach an ending point is to factor in a magic number that is the percentage of used game sales that cannibalize new game sales. Why do I call it a magic number? Because it cannot be established. We just don't know. That's why it's so dangerous for companies to be attempting to cripple the used game market with the use of one-time online passes, etc. There's no way for them to even estimate the effect this will have on their sales. They're flying blind.

Let's get back to that theoretical desk lamp I mentioned above – you know, the desk lamp I own and can sell to someone else free of moral or legal quandary and free of concerns that someone will publicly condemn me as a furniture thief for doing so. Why is it different from a videogame? Somebody's always bringing up the starving videogame designers and how they have to feed their kids etc etc. I get it. If you want to do the most you can to support your hobby, spend the extra $10 and buy a new copy.

But somebody designed that lamp, right? Some guy in Scandinavia who has two blond-haired moppets who go through jars of lingenberry jam like the world was about to end? Does he pen scathing articles on desk lamp enthusiast websites pillorying Craigslist's furniture section?

In short, what's the difference with videogames? I'll venture an answer. GameStop is mostly a scapegoat: Its business plans might be misaligned or even diametrically opposed to the game industry's, but I think it's just a convenient villain.

Game developers spend crazy millions of dollars to make games and then they go bankrupt or get shuttered immediately when not enough people buy them at $60 a pop, the highest sticker price of entertainment media by a factor of three or so. They can't seem to figure out how to make money consistently.

Publishers have every right to attempt to get people to buy more new games. But there's a reason that things like one-time use codes for online tend to rub people the wrong way. If people buy games used, it's not because they're being malicious. It's plain and simple: They're buying used because new ones are too expensive.

When a publisher locks key important features like online play or tits behind a pay-to-play firewall, it's not adding value. It's attempting to raise the effective price of used games to make the new game more appealing in relative, not absolute, terms.

Nintendo saw this problem coming long ago in Japan and took action. First, it aggressively moved towards producing software with smaller development budgets that it could sell at lower price points – price points that it could maintain throughout the lifetime of the software without having to slash the price later. It attempted to develop games that would be sticky over long periods of time, so that users wouldn't want to sell them. And most notably it established Club Nintendo, a loyalty program that rewards purchases of new games with cool prizes.

Lower prices, better games, free stuff. Contrast this with everybody else's plan: higher prices, chopped-up games, less stuff than you used to get.

Are the game industry's sales woes the fault of jerkface used games buyers peeing in the pool and causing every game publisher not named Nintendo or Activision Blizzard to lose money?

Or is it that not enough people want the games that they're making for the price at which they're trying to sell them?

If it's the latter, then the games business is broken, and attempting to fix the used-games problem while ignoring the root cause would be like putting a Band-Aid on a tumor.

Photo: Cian Ginty/Flickr