This makes me mad. First EA and now Ubisoft (and more to follow) are going to start charging fees for used console games to do anything online (multiplayer and dlc). the fee ubi is doing is $5 and EA is doing $10., Ubi says they are watching the reaction to the $10 "solution" and if it works they will use it.And according to some publishers, buying used games is worse than piracy! Ubisoft has been really making me mad lately, they introduce crappy DRM that ruins legit customers' gameplay, they totally wreck conviction and made it more run and gun than stealth,and now this! If someone pays $50 a year (i don't anymore thanks to my ps3) to play on xbox live, there shouldn't be any other fees.
http://www.dailytech.com/Ubisoft+to+Roll+Out+Used+Game+Fees+Too+Gamestop+Cheers+Idea/article18450.htm

Wow, I don't say this alot but this pisses me off. Why can't they just accept that pirates are going to hack their crappy DRM and play their games. And at least with used games, they get most of the profit. I would rather pay 54 dollars than 60 for some game I will beat in a couple of days, And the fact that they are charging for multiplayer on top of xbox live service is out of control. People will stop buying their games if this keeps up.

I agree, it's a bit of a disgrace, you can pay upwards of £100 ($145) to get onto XBL before even buying the games (Wireless kit and 1 years Live subscription) I mean imagine the new Medal of Honour (using it as an example because it's the EA equivalent to CoD) just comes out and you've just bought live. You don't have the money to buy it new so you have to wait a few weeks/months or wait for it to be available used. Now all of your friends are playing it online and tell you "It's the best multiplayer game ever". You're really going to want that game to play it with them. So you buy it used for £30 ($43) and then you have to pay an extra £10 ($14) that almost takes it up to the original price. You may as well have bought it new! It's ridiculous!

What also sucks for the consumer is Microsoft wont then scrap their XBL charges.

It's gone too far in my opinion.

Ive read a fair bit about this,one suggestion is that the extra money they gain will be spent on improving servers,DLC and patches,if so then i think it is a good thing.Also if you buy the game new from the shop it wont concern you but it is a bummer that you cant lend a game to a friend ~ but if it improves the online quality then im all for it,but i guess thats a big IF !!
edit : another thing i want to say on this subject is that if you buy a game second hand the money doesnt go to the people who put the hard work and effort into making the game,and if they dont earn from it why would they make any more games ??

As retroman says, the game companies dont get any money from the sale of used games.
But they have already made their money from the game, so if anything they should be hitting up shops that sell used games for a cut rather then charging the buyer.

Game shops that sell used games make a killing on used games, most times they pay you only half of what the game costs used and sell it at double that.
So they buy a game off you for $20, sell it for $40.

The problem with my suggestion above, the game companies getting a cut of used game sales from the store owners, is that said store owners would increase the price of the used games anyway.

All in all it's just the gaming companies getting greedier and greedier.
Considering most people end up buying DLC which should have been included in the game itself anyways (thus making the company money from a used game anyway) there's no good excuse for them doing things like this.

Alright, that's it, I've had it with these people. I'm sick of Ubisoft, and if I didn't love Prince of Persia so much, I'd be forever done with them, and EA is cutting it close too. Forget it. First-party games seem to be the only way you can avoid paying twice as much as necessary (and even that's not guaranteed). But that's just stupid, the idiots have already made money on that copy, charging people for buying it off a friend is gonna get their business taken elsewhere.

bignatealpha : nate i know how u feel. i like splinter cell, assasins creed was alright and so was prince of persia, but with the new drm they wont get any money from me on those games. also they will probably ruin PoP eventually just like they did SC with Conviction. This was the breaking point for me. Im a pirate if i download it, Im a worse than a pirate if i LEGALLY buy it used. so screw it i wont take their bs anymore.

Another thing I thought of-
Rental places will not be able to rent out games anymore, because you will need to buy a code for the rental game just to play online.
Yeah, I'm sure people will do that

It's a lot better to buy something then rent it. I actually only buy games for their serial code number if I ever get banned so I can just enter it and continue using my old disc It would make sense to charge money on used games only if they can clean the online record and establish a new account with same serial number. It would suck getting a game with banned code where you are not able to play online.

I think its messed up though, if they are going to charge people for used games then they should just jack price of new games an extra $5 - $10 and problem solved.

JigSaw : well you reminded me of something. If the extra $5-$10 is the "online fee" which is already included in the price of a new game, does that mean if i dont want to play online i get to pay less? i dont think so.

@metal572 - No because the online code will be free when you buy the game brand new ~ its just the code will only work once ~ so if you buy second hand you will need to buy a seperate code if you want to play online,offline obviously you wont need it ~ really they are trying to encourage people to buy brand new from the correct retailers so that the money goes to the guys who deserve it,which i think is fair enough
Like i said before,if it improves an online experience with better servers etc im all for it,but i can see why people are opposed to the idea

Another downside is for users of XBL.
I know that it is very easy to get banned from XBL as the moderators of it dont look into things, they just ban if a user gets enough complaints without even reviewing the reasons.
And people abuse this system to get people banned that they dont like or that beat them in games alot.
Under this new system someone wont even need to be buying a new game to need a new code, if they get banned from XBL then they will need to buy a new key as well as buy a new XBL account.

edit-
retroman: It's well and good to say if the money is spent improving online experience and DLC, but we all know that isn't going to happen.
This is purely a money making idea.
And there is nothing wrong with buying a game second hand, it's not like you are cheating the company out of the money for that game because they already got paid for that copy.
It's better then those people that buy the game, play it then return it within the returns period for a full refund or exchange.

Yes, and i dont have $60 to spend on all the games i want so i wait for a good used price.

DarkHyren : I think we're gonna see Blockbuster, GameStop, and other rental/used game stores stop carrying Ubisoft and EA games very soon... because nobody's going to buy them.

I disagree. I think that they're still going to have plenty of business due to the big brands they own. I suppose they thought it wouldn't hurt them that much if it didn't work because they can always count on their big brands to sell. Still, I think it was a dumb idea. It will probably affect their business negatively in the short run.

That sounds really dumb, that really is just a quick way to make money too. They already have alot of money they really don't NEED to do this at all.