“There was no intention of lessening the experience of the game,” explains Shawn 'Snow' Baxter, Capcom's community specialist, in a post to the company's forums. "Essentially, RE Mercs was treated like an arcade fighting game. You unlock characters, levels, etc and they just stay unlocked as they would in an arcade machine. There was no hidden motive to prevent buying used copies. It's not some secret form of DRM. It's simply the way we designed the save system to work with the arcade type of gameplay.”
Baxter further emphasized RE: Mercenaries 3D is a non-linear game in which the focus is not on progressing from level to level, but replaying missions to achieve a greater score. As such, all of the game's content is available all the time, so it makes no difference when and where someone decides to save their progress. And, as an added benefit to second-hand users, Baxter explained: “Anyone purchasing a copy of the game secondhand would have access to all the missions and skills that the original owner unlocked, in addition to the content that was available to the original user.”