It'll never happen at a console level. Certain publishers might do it, but the console makers don't really have the luxury of kicking GameStop and other used game sellers in the teeth like that. Look at all the energy that went into picking apart the locks on the PS3 when Sony removed the OtherOS function, not to mention there was a lawsuit filed (win or lose, it's bad PR and expensive). In the PC world, when morons like Ubisoft started requiring this always on Internet connection, people broke that before a lot of the games even went on sale.
It's probably too much to ask that the entertainment industry as a whole pull its head out of its **** and realize that if they stopped trying to repackage the same tired garbage, people might be willing to pony up their hard earned cash for it. If the music industry stopped shoveling money into these flavor of the week one-hit wonder bands/artists, and focused on artists/groups with some real talent beyond being a piece of meat for people to oogle on stage in skimpy outfits, imagine how many more CDs they could sell. Then there's the fact that if Napster taught us anything, it's that people want digital distribution of music. The CD is something like 30 years old now, but the music industry clings to it white knuckled talking about how they'll pry it from their cold dead hands. Well, that might be sooner than they think if they don't make some sweeping changes soon.
Then there's the movie industry which has apparently reached a new level of lazy and started making movies based on comic books. Never mind that the "origin story" for most comic book heroes is complete ill suited to movie format, since by the time you tell the back story, there's maybe 20 minutes left for the actual movie. Or the fact that they spend all their money on special effects. Not to sound like some artsy film snob, I enjoy a good gun fight, car explosion, etc as much as the next guy, but you still need at least a semi-coherent plot, and actors with at least a modicum of talent beyond just angry and goofy moron.
The TV side of the movie industry has just gone more and more to these throw away "reality" shows, which says quite a bit about the bankruptcy of our culture given how every time you think they can't possibly sink any lower with the premise of the show, they do. Slowly dying off are the quality scripted shows. Then, at least in the US, the commercial breaks every 5 minutes have destroyed our collective attention span, so we're lucky if we can keep hold of the plot for an entire half hour sitcom, never mind serial dramas where every episode is like another chapter in a book. The fact that Seinfeld, the self-styled show about nothing, did so well is just proof of that.
Which brings us to the video game industry, where probably ever since the N64/PSX days, where it started becoming more and more about the graphics, the actual game portion of the game gets less and less attention. The PS3 and 360 really accelerated this in a big way. How many games are there out there which look absolutely fantastic, but are completely unplayable because the controls are so sloppy? Or once you get past the nice looking graphics, there's no real plot to the game, or the game is over in 5-6 hours? They'd be better off as a kind of animated movie than a video game. I won't even get into sports games where every year it's basically the same game, just a few names and stats have been changed.
Nintendo largely focused on the gameplay with the Wii, and it was a runaway success for the company. There were some obvious teething pains as developers wrapped their head around this new model, but look at how fast Sony and Microsoft tried to copy what Nintendo was doing. Sony copied Nintendo almost exactly, while Microsoft at least took it upon themselves to advance the basic idea a bit.
Then there's the policy virtually every one of these industries has adopted to some degree or another, and that is treating its customers like criminals. That one has never made sense to me. People who actually purchase the legal copy of some product end up with a significantly worse experience than the people who pirate it with all the DRM garbage stripped out. These companies complain about all the money they lose to piracy, and I have a certain level of sympathy to that argument, but short of giving your product away, piracy is just a cost of doing business. It's the same as all the crazy lawsuits that will inevitably be filed against you if you're a large successful company. Even if the majority of then have absolutely no merit, you need to budget accordingly. However, when a company spends $50,000 or whatever it is to license some DRM technology, then bemoans how much it costs to develop games, I stop bothering to listen. If you took that $50K for the DRM software and put that back into the game development, then just maybe you'd come up with a game people would consider to be worth plunking down some money for. And instead of devoting 90% of the game budget to graphics, maybe flip that around. Create a really fun game with an engaging story and tight responsive controls. Graphics should be a secondary, or even tertiary concern. I would also be willing to bet that people would settle for lower quality graphics if game developers had a realistic physics engine as well, not just simple rag doll physics. If you look at Final Fantasy XIII compared to several other games that have come out since, you notice how lifelike a lot of the character movements are in FFXIII. Right down to little things, where it actually looks like the character is holding onto a ledge or something in the environment. It's not perfect, but it helps create the illusion that allows you to lose yourself in the game. The Uncharted series also comes to mind, where the character dialog is just so natural seeming, that there are times where you might forget you're playing a game and not watching a movie. Again, the graphics are probably only average, but the gameplay and engaging story make all the difference. For that matter, despite the rather crap ending to Mass Effect 3, you've got to admit that aside from the annoying ammo thing they introduced in ME2, the combat in ME3 was honed pretty much to perfection. So virtually everything leading up to the end was a great game.
It would be nice, if just for once, there was a major industry out there that would admit to having its head up its **** and not listening to what customers want. Then of course the next crucial step is to actually start listening to what customers want and letting that be reflected in new products.