This is true, as
Strauss Zelnick said: "The world has changed. When we consider a console release, the PC format can be 40% or 50% now of that revenue. Ten years ago, that number was 1% or 2%. Clearly, the world is changing."
But it's not a choice between physical vs digital reselling, it's a choice between digital reselling vs only selling first-hand copies. From a publisher's point of view the choice is pretty obvious.
Also, I don't know if digital reselling is obviously better for the companies, unless it is heavily regulated (see below). For one thing, the physical medium can suffer from wear and tear, and isn't 100% guaranteed to work, unlike digital which is always a perfect replica. You may be able to guarantee it will work by buying from your local GameStop, but those copies are localized and reliant on nearby gamers to sell their copies. The alternative is to buy from eBay, you can't guarantee that the product will work but due to scale you have many more options.
On the other hand, digital is both 100% guaranteed to be working AND has the advantage of reaching the entirety of the global market (unless regulated), users would have zero fear in buying a second-hand copy and it would cannibalize sales of first-hand ones, unless developers cripple their games in some way to punish second-hand buyers.
Steam can regulate the market in a couple of ways, like setting a minimum price, forcing a wait of one month, locking to individual countries/regions, not allowing copies to be sold above what they were originally bought at, giving a large cut to developers etc. but there's no guarantee the French court won't just slap Valve with another fine for market manipulation or some such.
My big fear is that an unregulated second-hand market would kill games like Sekiro (which was my GOTY). Sekiro is single-player, no online, not much in the way of replayability, and it's super hard; it's also one of the greatest and best-feeling games I've ever played. It would also be absolutely slaughtered by a digital second-hand market.
Second-hand prices would very quickly drop after release due to its difficulty (those who didn't refund before 2 hours would sell in frustration), and the people who quickly beat it (takes a weekend at most) would then flip their copies. There is no incentive to keeping the game due to no online, and if you want to replay it in a year or two... just re-buy a second-hand copy which would be much cheaper then anyhow.
Sekiro is a good enough game that plenty of people would still keep it, but would it be profitable enough for From to considering making a second one? They would probably be forced to tack on some online and invading/PVP to keep players hooked, despite it arguably watering down the experience. What about all the AA games trying to copy Souls? They'd probably be screwed.
Note: this is all practical talk. From an intellectual perspective I'm the sort of guy who thinks all information and data should be virtually free, costing no more than the electricity required to transfer the information and flip the bits on my hard drive back and forth. The ability to make virtually unlimited copies of a good is the single greatest power digital technology allows. Sadly the world does not function on ideals, and creators have to eat too.
metacouncil.com
