Steppenwolf said:
Because you still want to play games worth playing in ten years. Its simple as that. Look what happend to the Amiga developer scene in the 1990's. EA just fired 600 people. games dont develop themselfes. The people behind them have to feed familys too. From the gamer perspective its very short sighted to safe a couple of bucks on a used Gamestop copy instead of buying a new game.
The Amiga developer scene was fucked over by Commodore mismanaging their home computer business and the simultaneous rise of the IBM-compatibles. The 80's-early 90's were a brilliant time for small-time developers but Amstrad and Sinclair were out of their depth, Amiga and Atari were run by morons and the rest is history.
EA just fired 600 people because that's reality. The company I work for just shed a third of it's employees because we're in an economic downturn too and we don't have any scapegoats like piracy to blame - it's just the reality of the market at the moment. It just happened that EA were spending big just as the bubble burst. It has nothing to do with rentals, used sales or piracy.