[ajsnigrutin]

Why would a consumer want a game, that they can't even resell? Imagine the same applied to phones, cars, houses, etc?

Should the governments (=laws and regulations) be protecting a few media houses or millions of consumers?

[nlawalker]

> Why would a consumer want a game, that they can't even resell?

Because it's less valuable than one that could be resold, and thus should be obtainable more cheaply.

What goes unsaid in all these threads is that people don't just want "ownership", they want it for the same price that they're currently getting whatever it is they're getting today. The inability to resell or lend something is priced in; the market has established that people will pay $x for a license to access something that they can't lend or resell.

Gabe Newell once said "piracy is not a pricing issue, it’s a service issue", but it's not, it's a value issue. The reason content providers don't provide the service people want is because they know no one would pay the price at which they would consider offering it, so they don't bother.

[PawgerZ]

> The inability to resell or lend something is priced in

Why are the physical versions of games the exact same price as the digital version? Shouldn't the digital version be much cheaper because you can't copy, lend, or resell it?

Ditto for all forms of media

[johnnyanmac]

Probably due to pricing parity agreed upon by physical retailers. You're right in that they should be cheaper, but Walmart/Gamestop et al. were smart enough to negotiate that early on in digital distribution. For the same reason, many early Steam releases was not beholden to this and thus cheaper.

Nowadays, there's enough market capture that they can simply charge the same amount due to greed, though. But there are early reasons for that.

[nlawalker]

The digital version is also substantially more convenient than the physical version.

> copy

Crucially, most retail physical media is not copyable (by most people). If it were, the market landscape would look very different.