Second hand game sales are an inescapable fact of the gaming industry.

While Japan came within inches of legislating its way out of the practice , even slapping a ‘NO RESALE’ logo on every new game produced for a while, the law was quashed and Akihabara’s second hand boutiques carry on unscathed.

Anyone who creates and sells videogame product must come to terms with the fact that they’ll never see a penny from the many consumers who legitimately pay to play your title, the proceeds of the sale instead being pocketed by Game or Electronics Boutique and so on.

Indeed, without second hand game sales many of those retailers who do offer new and second hand product side by side on store shelves would see their business models collapse. Arguably new game sales would suffer as a result, consumers used to paying for their new games at least in part with their old ones, no longer able to service such an expensive hobby.

Gearbox Software, developer of Brother’s In Arms Hell’s Highways, released today on Xbox 360, has come up with a novel way of getting gamer’s to hang onto their game even after it’s finished.

A number of the game’s achievements are dependent on the player continuing to log in to Xbox Live and play the title on a daily basis for a considerable length of time. The first, ‘Focused’ delivers 25 points for those player who, while connected to Xbox Live, play the game once a day for a week. Easy money. The next, ‘Committed’, doles out 50 points to those play the game once a week for three months. Still pretty easy but definietly moving into irritating. Next, ‘Obsessive’ adds a gigantic 100 points to your gamerscore if you manage to play the game for once a day for 100 days. Um, that’s a no from me.

As if all that weren’t enough, one final achievement, ‘Remember September ’44′ rewards players with no less than 50 achievement points for simply playing the game at some point on September 17th, the anniversay of the events depictied in the game. As you have to be connected to Xbox Live at the time, there’s no way to cheat by fixing the time on your console’s clock, meaning that gamers who want the full 1000 points on offer will have to hang on to the game for close to a year from now (and then remember to put the blasted thing on).

It is perhaps a cyncial ploy (certainly in the case of the first three rewards) to keep gamers from trading in their game after a week as well as to keep them playing it more regularly for much longer than they might have otherwise. Bribing players with kudos points (such that they are) is a dubious practice and one we hope other developers don’t ape. Far better to spend your time ensuring the game is good and enduring enough to keep player playing on its own merits than buy them off.