His sense of value isn't skewed simply because he got the game for less than its full retail value. The simple fact is that while the price of the ACTUAL game the DLC is a supplement to went down, the price of the supplements, themselves remained the same.

You can say that you made the decision that it was worth it, but there is more that goes into a decision of value than just how much it costs. As the author mentioned, there's the possibility of regaining SOME money from selling ME2, but there is NO renumeration possible in the slightest for the DLC. It would be like buying an old car, and then parts for the car, and yet only being able to resell the car and not the parts you bought.

This fad of "gamers are too entitled" also needs to stop. An educated consumer group, as you put it, does not simply accept whatever practices happen in a given industry. An educated consumer group knows the scored and is respected by the industry manufacturers to the point where consumer complaints result in a change in industy standards.

That's something we definitely don't have today. Instead, we have too many people saying things like, "Get over it. It costs money, so you shouldn't complain about having to pay for it," as if that's the entirety of the issue. That's honestly only one aspect. As mentioned in the article, other industries are at least attempting to give the consumer the impression that they get more bang for their buck. But in gaming, we are increasingly being charged full retail for less content, and then being charged further for content removed and sold at a later date. And, as in this case, additional content does not depreciate accordingly with its source material. 

Therefore, I can buy Valkyria Chronicles for 20 bucks or even less, but I'll be spending more like $30 (if not more; it's been a while since I last checked on all the DLC) if I want the full game. Granted, I wouldn't be averse to paying full price for the core title, as it's a game I absolutely love. But none of the DLC adds the same amount of content as the game itself, which sells for a fraction of the total of the DLC.

It is, strictly speaking, difficult to justify paying $15 for two hours of additional content when you paid $25 for 30+. That initial investment is easy to see as money well spent, but the DLC cost in comparison is rather steep. And unlike the money you forked over for the ME2 game, there is no way to recoup the losses of the DLC.

Am I repeating myself yet? I hope so, because maybe it'll get through that way.

We ARE entitled, within reasonable parameters. And we are entitled moreso than in any other entertainment industry, because only gaming has this level of interactivity. Only in gaming does success hinge so heavily on the satisfaction of the consumer... or it would, if so many people weren't so keen to just lay down and say "Whatever" to everything the industry gives us.

We definitely agree on one point–the economics of digital goods, IE, the price never, EVER goes down, needs to change. But we're talking about two seperate things here. Publishers are dicking gamers over because they're trying to extract value from the secondary market. 

Here's a hypothetical: what if used games were abolished, but it meant that publishers felt comfortable decreasing the price of games as time went on? I feel like that would be a worthy trade-off if publishers can be trusted to keep their end of the bargain, but that's a big if. 

The TL;DR of this whole argument: we need the economics of Steam on consoles–the money goes directly to publishers and developers, without a middleman to muddy up the waters with diminished disc prices and an excuse to charge for online passes. We certainly don't need to take whatever publishers give us, but we should give the industry an opportunity to present a fair value proposition in which we give them money for the games we want to play. 

It's not just a big "if." It's a MASSIVE "IF." Not only that, but this would still all be predicated on the guarantee of a quality product, something which simply CAN'T be done. We all thought Brink and Dead Island would be great out-of-the-box experiences, and we were sorely wrong; there's nothing to stop that from happening with ANY game, even from much anticipated titles like The Last Guardian. Still, with the current used game market, we can do something with that copy of a game we don't like. Without it, even if we only paid twenty bucks, we're still SOL.

Which brings me to the core of my point on the lack of a used game market: what do we own? If we buy these games and have no ability to resell them, it can be argued that we don't even own them. As opposed to PC games(licenses that are usually something like lifetime warranties, in that you get to play as long as you hold the software; or as long as the servers are up for online games, which tends to be a VERY long time on PC), in which the majority contain an EULA which outlines that the purchase is of a license and not the software itself, most console games are the property of the person who paid for them.

I, for one, would not be happy with the proposed hypothetical for the above stated reasons. The longevity of online games is at the mercry of the game makers: whenever they like, they can shut down servers and effectively diminish the value of a recently made purchase. Online passes are a joke, a giant cash grab in an attempt to generate revenue from sales they have no right to be a part of. And there's absolutely zero promise that game prices won't simply rise in the wake of an erased used game market: what would keep them from charging whatever they wanted?

We could probably go back and forth on this forever if I had to guess, but my main point is that we as gamers (and more broadly, as consumers) need to give these game companies a financially viable alternative to the things we hate so much. Personally, I think digital distribution with more variable, experimental price points (a la Steam) could be the answer–as long as platform holders make it as easy as possible to get games on their service, the sheer number of games available will drive down prices as time goes on from the release. The economics affecting game prices needs to move away from the used game market and in to the digital goods space.

As more games move towards service-based revenue models, we gamers are going to have to do more than complain when DLC seems overpriced. We need to judge the total value proposition of each big release and decide if what they're offering is worth the cash–we can't just buy the next big thing and then pour our rage on to the Internet, because then the Next Big Thing 2 will just come the following year in all the same annoying trappings. 

We have to vote with our dollars, not with forum complaints. We can't simply say that online passes are shit–we need to suggest a different model that we'd be more inclined to put our money into. Don't buy DLC season passes without an announcment explaining EXACTLY what you will eventually be getting ("four new pieces of DLC" is not even close to good enough). 

I think the point was that there would come a point in time where the cost of the DLC (in the author's example, for Mass Effect 2, a years-old game) would be higher than that of the game, itself. He's not arguing the value of Mass Effect, but rather that the price of the DLC doesn't reflect its value in relation to the primary game.

Potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay for $20=value.

An extra 5 hours for $10= not so much value.