Battlefield 3 is barely over a year old.

It’s not totally farfetched. One way it could happen is if they sold games with a “Registration Code” inside the box, which requires you to register the game to your gamertag. So you can play the game on any console that is signed in to your gamertag.

When you SELL the game the new owner simply enters that same code and it transfers the ownership over to their gamertag. It would no longer work on your system but you wouldn’t care because you SOLD IT, remember?

So the used game industry wouldn’t be hurt by it and could still function as normal. The only people I could see this effecting are those who have been pirating their 360 games. Which is the exact reason why Microsoft or Sony would implement this concept, and a ridiculous reason to be angry about it.

Seeing as how one of the largest age groups of gamers are the under 18 still living with mommy and daddy crowd it’s a ludicrous to think that “broke gamers” don’t matter.

And for every spoiled brat who gets every game they ask for since their parents can’t afford the time to actually spend with them, there are ten normal kids who consider themselves lucky to own three games a year, new or otherwise.

That isn’t even scratching the surface of the 20-30 something who is laid off right now and has to save to get their game on.

Don’t be such a condescending jerk just cause you have money to blow. Gamestop is one of the many ways many of us try to save money to live within our means.

And as a further side argument to keeping used games, many times Producing companies stop making copies of a game and Gamestop and other used venders are the only place to get a copy. Go out and try to find a new copy of Metroid Prime Trilogy or any number of “limited edition” games.

I like to let my friends and family borrow my games for them to play, hoping to inspire them to buy the same games so that we can play together. I HATE downloadable games for that reason alone. Don’t get me wrong, I have downloaded a ton of them on my respective systems, but given the choice I would rather take a hard copy that can be transfered rather than a digital copy. What if I’m going over to my buddies place and want to show him that sweet new game I just got? If they move on to a system where games are tied to consoles, I have to move the whole console with me, even if they have the same console themselves!

My point:

#1) Microsoft is most likely looking at linking games to their next console (perhaps there will be a small rewritable area on the center ring of the disc, a single bit is all that would be needed, only the size of a pin prick).

#2 WORST IDEA EVER. IF they implement it, it will forever be a black mark on the history of video games, on par with or worse than ET the game, the Crash of 83′, Virtual Boy, and the Red Ring of Death.

And on another note, I have been hearing rumors that the next-gen consoles could ditch hard copy games all together and stick solely to a downloadable model like Steam. I call BS on this as well. There are still plenty of homes that do not have broadband, or if they do have broadband, they could have slow download speeds and this would be cumbersome. Not to mention that Comcast and other ISP’s would go nuts if everyone was downloading 2GB+ files on a regular basis.