I just got around to reading that last article as well and while I've seen him make the same general arguments before on his show, I have to say I love the way he puts it. If you need to punish your customers to run a successful business then you deserve to fail. If you need to try and nickel and dime your customers to succeed then you deserve to fail.

He's made the point quite a few times that the problem is not one of used games and whatnot, but of game budgets and publisher expectations being wildly out of touch with reality. Some of his favourite examples have been Dark Souls and, in that article, Metro: Last Light as games with relatively low budgets which were downright amazing, looked great, and sold more than enough to earn a profit without needing to be the next Call of Duty. Same thing goes for games like Tomb Raider but in reverse. It was a great game, but why anyone thought it could sell five million copies is beyond me. You could say the same thing about Dead Space 3.

The problem is, AAA publishers and developers don't really know how to develop games that have a budget suited for realistic sales goals. Instead of figuring that a new Tomb Raider reboot might be able to sell 2-3 million copies and budgeting accordingly, they start with the budget and set sales goals based on what it needs to sell to make money. Any executive that can't see how ass backwards this is needs to hand in their business degree.

And I loved the way that he actually took what CliffyB said and turned it around to make his own point. I'd seen that statement before a few days ago or whenever but never really arrived at the same conclusion, despite feeling the same way and recognizing the statement itself as utter bulltrout at face value. I'm constantly impressed with Jim's ability to do things like that though. Where he finds some truth in a statement but explains why it works for his point rather than against.

And finally, because I apparently can't stop singing his praise, I agree with him completely on the idea that publishers have no real interest in lowering prices to the end consumer. As proof I offer up the entire country of Australia. If I'm not mistaken, the reason game prices used to be so high was because their currency was weaker many years ago. Then their currency strengthened considerably compared to the American dollar and publishers... didn't change a damn thing because people were used to paying really high prices there and they figured they could get away with it, despite making more money than ever on every sale they make there.