I don't think it's entirely ridiculous that you can't resell an item that never degrades. If this was possible, it would be a huge blow to publishers. Imagine a new game being released on PS4 for $60. A good number of people buy the game at release, play it through and then put it up on a marketplace at a lower price. At this time, there is zero incentive for a buyer to get it from PlayStation store since he will get the exact same product in either case.
I say this as a gamer who exclusively buys digital downloads these days. Would I like to be able to resell downloaded games? Yes. I just don't think it's realistic.
Thats an argument for protectionism, but not for consumer benefit. In fact it feels like the opposite -- using IP law to force consumers to pay more for the exact same product that could be bought "used."
Two hours of play is already a longer return period than most physical game retailers have offered.
I hope it is being used to incentivize publishers to fix their shit before release, rather than dumping buggy, broken, incomplete trash on their captive pre-orders.
Most of my Steam orders are sale items, so my calculus is that it really only has to give me as much enjoyment as the equally costly big coffee at Starbucks for it to be worthwhile, and that's a low bar.
As for reselling games, that would seriously hurt developers. A single game could be resold 100s of times, but only the first sale goes to the developer, and everyone else in the chain plays for free.
Video games have been resold since video games were invented and there still continue to be new titles.
The worrying thing about digital is it could be vastly easier to trade used games. There is no worrying about scratched discs, and you don't get pennies on the dollar for the trade. You could just play used games endlessly without ever spending more than an initial investment.
It's not really strange, it's been this way for years. When have you ever been able to sell software you downloaded? Neither Apple or Google let you sell used apps, steam has never allowed used game sales, etc.
And it makes way more sense this way. You are not buying a physical object that took labor and resources to produce. A physical object that would go to waste otherwise. You are buying a bunch of bits which can be copied endlessly. There's no depreciation over time, no downside to buying used over new. No personal attachment to a specific object when you can just download it again when you want to play it. No middlemen to take a cut out of the trade so that you can just buy and sell it at exactly the same price.
The reason multi-platform games aren't cheaper on PC, is because Gamestop or console makers have contracts that prevent it. If you put your game on PC at a lower price, they will stop selling it.
Software takes 0 effort and 0 resources to produce more copies. All of the cost comes from the initial development. The actual disks or bandwidth for downloads costs pennies.
So when you sell a chair, you aren't decreasing the quality of future chairs in any way. Fewer chairs bought, just means there will be fewer chairs made the next year. Maybe a single chair maker will lose his job. Which sucks for him. But he really isn't needed because the world doesn't need more chairs.
With software, less demand means less quality. When you get less sales, then the budget for the next video game will be less and less. Fewer niche games will be made because the budget gets too small to support them.
Even though the demand is theoretically there - there are enough gamers willing to spend money on such a game to support it. The problem is it creates a free rider problem where no one wants to be the one to pay for it, when they can just free ride off of used games and not spend a dime.
Second, the very important difference is time sensitivity. Games get the majority of their sales in the first month, and it slowly declines after that. If everyone sells used, then all of the sales after the first month don't matter. So the vast majority of their income is lost.