Fine. Don't tolerate. Don't buy the games. That's your power as the consumer. If you disapprove of EA's or Activision's practices, don't buy their products. It is in their interest for as many new games to be purchased as possible. To them, the consumer who buys the game new is loyal; the consumer who buys the game used is not loyal to them. They have devised a system to reward the customers who are loyal to them, at a lesser cost to them. And, even if a customer is not loyal enough to them to buy new, they can show their loyalty to the company by purchasing that 'new game dlc' online or in store or whatever. And the price is generally high enough to make it similar to the price of buying new. This sends a message to the customer: "Why wait? You want the stuff that everyone else got. Why bother waiting for a used copy, that won't necessarily be in good condition or have it's shit together. Just buy it new, it's easier."
See, the difference is this. While it's completely im-fucking-possible to truly prove that the company has lost a sale, whether due to piracy or due to preowned sales, there is a slight difference; money is changing hands. With piracy, that doesn't happen, thus making it totally impossible to prove a lost sale. With used games however, it shows that the consumer is willing to spend money, and it's not that far of a leap (though it may be an unprovable leap) that they would buy it new.
I don't know how exactly the purchasing system works between the wholesale/retail thing. Does gamestop buy 50 million copies at X dollars and then sell for X+Y mark up? Or do they buy them for z, sell for X+Y mark up, and owe X-Z to the publisher? Again, I don't know. I assume that they buy them up front.
Let's assume that they do buy them upfront. Gamestop analyzes pre orders, market research/study things, previous sales of similar games, previous game sales in general, previous sales from the same developer and same publisher, alongside any supposed consumer feedback about the franchise/developer/publisher. Hell, they probably even study forum activity. They use that information to determine how many copies to buy from the publisher. Let's say 100 million. They distribute those out to the stores based, again, on the above data. They then study the sales of that game. They pay close attention. If they find that out of every five copies, three were sold immediately, one was sold soon after an one more lingered in the shop as copies went back and forth across the preowned games counter, they may decide they don't need that fifth copy for the next game that matches that criteria, that the stores can survive on later resupplies, shift stock around between stores, and push the used games on the consumer, save some money on buying costs and try to push the sales of that game into the black sooner rather than later. This is good for Gamestop. This is bad for the publisher, who will be selling less games to gamestop.
Somebody 'already' buying the game is the not the same as two people buying the game.
I doubt that second hand sales seriously cut into the sales of a game; but i do not doubt the cut is there, especially in long term sales.
Why didn't you buy your wacom tablet used? Why are you so very happy with it? Whats the price difference between used and new?
Haven't you bought games you enjoyed new? or used? And bought games you didn't enjoy new or used?
I assume you did your research before you bought your tablet. Since it's so expensive, I assume you did a lot. Do you the same for games? Do you look into whether it's known to have bugs with certain hardware or have localization issues or anything?
You can't really compare the two between the fact they aren't really in the same segment of the market. Entertainment products are far different from wacom tablets. Enterainment products can be a waste of money for reasons entirely subjective to people, i.e., the content. and the things that one person hates about the product be the thing one person loves about it, where as something like the tablet is far more likely to have to have much more common and similar complaints which would deal much more with the quality/construction of the product as opposed to entertainment product's content.