Digital games would be very easy to resell and a game can be easily bought once and resold tens/hundreds of times.
Plus any kind of discount would probably mean that you devalued your game forever.
The only thing that may seem different is the amount of potential customers you can reach at once by your sale, but it's not either: game resale on ebay or amazon allow the same thing, as well as whatever local personal ads site is popular (eg leboncoin in france).
Also, people like to own things, which is why no you didn't go and sell all your books/vhs/dvd/... after watching them when you bought those.
Don't let the "it's digital" be used as an excuse to allow companies to strip you of your rights, and especially don't think it's a good thing.
But modern game studios have not; quite the opposite. The indie game industry exists almost solely because of digital distribution, and resale would cripple them.
But I agree, I think this is a smaller problem for indies. Low cost of those games would make people not to bother much. 40$ aaa games on the other hand would lose a lot of bucks though.
The time investment of selling a digital copy of a game that is identical to all others should be 1 second of thought and clicking if not impeded by steam.
Only if the game is not worth keeping.
Also hard copies gets destroyed over time while a steam key last forever.
Technically, the steam key evaporates when you die. Accounts aren't supposed to be inheritable.
This will change, but Steam is too new for it to be a live issue now.
With 0 friction, there's no need to actually "own" a game. You can just purchase it whenever you want to play it.
Currently, the assumption is that anyone wishing to play a game will play the asking price, whether that's $60 or less. If you want to play AAA game du jour, you'll pay full price.
What if you can sell your digital game, with no friction? Well, you pay your $60, play for a couple of hours, and once you stop playing, you tell your steam market bot to sell the game at market price +- your preference. Then, when you want to play again, you tell your bot to buy the game again. Rinse, repeat.
This is not going to fit well within the game pricing model as we know it.
Even if the key or account could be sold second hand, there is no trust in it so there is no second hand market. Too much risk to be defrauded, for example the key is cancelled because it was a stolen card, or the first owner claims it back.
For physical games they absolutely have not. Nowhere near that at all. Even in the US it's a bit more than 25% of Gamestop revenue in the last year.
Look at NPD top 20 biggest games sellers of 2019, for every single one of them with online features you can go to your local store, buy a used copy for your ps4/xbox one/switch that has been used online, and play with it online, and the seller cannot play with it anymore.
The only physicial games for which that has become true is the PC games that register on steam (or other similar platforms such as uplay or origin), which is exactly what this case is about, this is the whole point of this court case.
Physical multiplayer games on console are actually a perfect exemple of 1) that you are wrong and it hasn't been killed, only on pc, and 2) the fact that a solution not only can work but already exists. Transfer of the game to a new Steam account and the new owner can play with it and his key, the old owner cannot.
Also just enter a video game store, at least in europe, and you will easily see that's it hasn't been "entirely killed" since roughly 50% of their store surface is dedicated to used copies resale ...
Modern games are already optimizing for "long term engagement" at every turn, with a $60 box product like Modern Warfare packed with Battle Pass and seasonal grinds. Gamers want less of this and more God of War, a game where most it's value is consumed in 1 or 2 play-throughs. That'd be incredibly unfair to developers of story driven games if people can burn through the campaign in Uncharted and then resell it for 80+% of the price (since digital used goods have no wear and tear and no risk of defect due to age, I'd presume the resale prices will be near-retail)
Someone who bought an 8hr game then thoroughly enjoys 8hr game and resells it to a future customer is a loss for the creator. The creator does not make money from the resale, the customer himself does not get a full refund and Steam loses future indie games on it's platform. It's a loss for everyone and a symptom of the dying games industry. Making big $$ in games was a 2015 thing, it's getting all locked up from here on out.
Then I went to the Steam Communitu hub and the first thing I saw was a thread about someone debating refunding the game. He finished the game (not easy to do, the puzzles require considerable mental effort) and enjoyed it, but felt that Steams "2 hours of playtime" refund policy laid a moral framework by which any game that provides less than 120 minutes of entertainment is a rip-off and should be refunded.
This game was a solo-effort that took 5 years.
Just as big businessed are cut-throat about screwing over consumers in the name of "shareholder rights", people are often equally cut-throat about screwing over who they buy from in the name of "consumer rights". Remember how many people abused Costcos return policy back when it was ridiculously generous?
If my indie favorites like Celeste became refundable or resellable, I wouldn't do it even though I've finished the game and won't play it anymore....this is out of a desire to be a patron to great art. But I think this view is in the minority. Most gamers will maximize their wallets and would return/resell their indie games when finished.
There's a discussion about how long a game should be, and something that 1.5 - 2hr is the same length as a movie. Having grown up on 60hr FF7, 2hrs seems to be blending the art form with film. Changing the refund time to 25% of the runtime makes sense for linear stories, but not so much endless mmo's or whatever.
TL;DR they might have to adapt, but I would not assume it is the end of the world.
I grew up in a world where games required a serial key, and worked perfectly well offline. I never wanted DRM or online requirement. Consider Diablo 3 vs Diablo 2. The day Diablo 3 was released, I went on vacation. I'd have loved to play Diablo 3 on my laptop while traveling to my destination, but it required an always-on connection. Nowadays, this is less of a problem because roaming in EU is practically free (part of your normal data plan). SaaS? Web 2.0? Didn't exist 20 years ago. The software world changes rapidly. We'll have to deal with these changes.