Trade-ins and the resale market are a great benefit to cost-conscious gamers (not to mention retailers gigging the trade-in values and resale markups). They're also a pain in the ass for developers, especially the smaller ones, who face creating popular but poor-selling titles because everyone swaps it around. In an interview with Develop magazine, Frontier founder David Braben says developers should stop complaining to retailers and figure out ways to make owning first-buy copies of their games essential.

"We need to help retailers," Braben said. "In fairness, they're probably doing it because they're struggling. But there are ways of tracking and deterring pre-owned sales."

His ideas: Unique codes on boxes, similar to those used for PC online games, to ensure the games can't be sold. Or, special content that can only be unlocked with a scratch-off card containing a one-use code.

But most likely, small developers will look to the downloadable channel as the way to go, Braben says. This will certainly become more viable in future generations of consoles, meaning devs still must cope with retail markets for the forseeable future.

Braben Questions Game Prices [Develop, via Destructoid]