Online Pass for Offline Content
Online passes that charge buyers of used games for online content are now a generally-accepted way for developers to get people to buy new, but what about an "online pass" for a single player game's content that's available on release? RAGE did it with sewer missions, and I doubted the wisdom of adding sewer levels - a bad FPS stereotype - to a game as the reward for buying new, but the upcoming action-RPG Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will have something similar. Ex-baseball player and studio founder Curt Schilling defends their use of the pass here, and I think he makes a good point.
The problem is that gamers want a huge, epic experience, one that likely costs tens of millions of dollars to make, and many want to pay bottom dollar for that experience, so they wait for games to go into bargain bins - or they buy used. What I think a lot of gamers don't understand is that if everyone does that, games of this scale and scope simply won't get made by a lot of developers who otherwise can do well at those budget levels. Games like the Mass Effect franchise are huge now, but the first one may have never been made if developers didn't think they could make their money back after spending the tens of millions required to make a game like that - especially one that was in a new IP without a huge franchise name backing it.
There almost certainly is a solution out there, a way to make a game on a smaller budget that's still great (just without the huge production values and setpieces), then slowly ramp up as the built-in fanbase grows. But at this point, the idea of bringing in a huge franchise and starting it at a high level is only possible if those who do buy into the game buy new and get those studios a return on their investment before the publisher shuts them down from the loss of cash. That's just how this goes.
