MS has been copping a lot of flak for their choice to allow publishers to decide whether or not to allow players to access content with preowned games on the Xbox One, but I'm going to have to step back for a second and talk about the problems with used games. Let's start with the way video games are funded. Games, like other digital media, are funded by an initial (or on-going) investment for the development of the title. Most of the time, that comes in the form of a publisher green-lighting funding for a development studio, though occasionally it occurs through self-funding by indie developers, crowd-funding, or a mix of the three. The big difference between this and physical media is that the bulk of the cost involved comes from a single event: the creation of the content. The costs of replicating the content, either through physical formats or digital downloads, are fairly slim. This can be contrasted with most physical products, where, although there are design costs associated with the product, the bulk of the cost comes from actually acquiring the physical resources and refining them into the desired products. Discarding this physical production would be costly and pointless, but with video games the physical production is inexpensive, especially in the case of digitally distributed products where it only arises [i]after[/i] a guaranteed sale. So what does this mean for the industry? Well, it means that, while in other industries a used sale will detract from potential sales in a relatively small way, a lost sale in the video game industry loses a buttload more money for publishers/developers. Every time a preowned game is purchased, developers usually get precisely zero of the dollars from it. This creates an environment of higher risk in the industry, leading to less investment in games and, overall, a smaller game market for [i]us[/i], the consumer. On top of that, it puts pressure on developers to produce DLC and long term multiplayer titles to recoup the losses they'd otherwise make from used game sales. This puts a disproportionate focus on multiplayer titles, giving us the wasteful (and occasionally detrimental) multiplayer modes of games like Mass Effect 3 or Spec Ops: The Line, to the detriment of their single-player components. There's a big future to be talked about in online gaming for the foreseeable future, but supporting the used game industry not only detracts from this as a whole, but stunts the kind of games that really explore what video games can do as a storytelling medium. The Walking Dead is one of the most recent games to demonstrate what video games can do in this respect - and there's a reason it was only ever released (at least, in a widespread way) as a digital download. Do we want to see this sector of the market expand, or should we just let it falter and be left behind, relegated to indie development structures? Games like Destiny and The Division look really cool, but there are still very real limitations to what can be done with those platforms, and games that succeed in storytelling do so [i]despite[/i] the preowned market, or by specifically evading it in limited ways. If this is where the future of video games as an artistic medium lies (And I really think it is), then we simply can't be neglecting it for the sake of consumer convenience; and if we want to be supporting the expansion of the gaming industry, we shouldn't be supporting the free reign of used games, or at the very least acknowledge that doing so comes at a real cost.