How is this not true for physical copies too?
Scope, and struggle. Right now if I wanted to sell one of my physical PS4 games, I have a couple of options. I could lug it over to a used game store and
maybe make a couple of bucks off of it (in credit), or I could put it up on eBay and sell it in a national (or potentially) worldwide marketplace. I suppose I could list it up on Craigslist or maybe advertise at my work to see if anyone was looking for a used copy. All of these things take time, effort, and potentially a certain amount of trust with your trading partner. The point is, you the consumer have to do all of the legwork to turn your piece of plastic you bought back into money. Your scope is limited to local transactions unless you're willing to pay a company like eBay, Paypal, UPS, etc a cut of your transaction to reach a wider audience. If I want to sell more than one game, the struggle aspect usually increases, sometimes exponentially.
Now enters digital game sales on Steam or other platforms. The mechanisms for making the transfer of ownership happen are incumbent on Valve (or any other digital storefront owner) to provide to you by law now. If you want to sell a game, you just click a button and immediately have access to a huge network of people worldwide who may want to buy your digital game from you. You press a button, and the storefront takes care of the rest - the license is automatically transferred to the buyer and you the seller automatically gets funds deposited in your account (does anyone really think that "Credit" is going to fly for the purposes of this law?). I
guess they could make this process as difficult as possible, like maybe if you want to sell a digital game you have to print off a piece of paper and physically mail it to someone so that they can scan it in manually using their Valve brand desktop scanner?
The point is, the physical second-hand market has been able to thrive in the digital age because of the above factors of scope and struggle. Having instant, easy access to replace those aspects digitally means people could buy a used digital copy every time they wanted to play a game, then sell it when they're done with that play session 25 minutes later. Then rinse and repeat every time they play the game, losing maybe only pennies at a time. Now imagine doing this with a PS4 disc and hiking over to gamestop several times every weekend to sell / rebuy the game you want to play and tell me there's no difference.
There's over 340 million people in the Eurozone alone, though (over 500 in the EU)... if this ends up spreading throughout the region as so many laws enacted in France tend to do you'd have to be kidding yourself to think publishers would just kiss such a profitable region goodbye, half of the top 10 gaming revenue countries are in the EU.
The region is profitable now because they're able to sell their products there. Implementing this would not only significantly reduce their profits but would also be detrimental to their business interests worldwide. There is no profit in operating at a loss (as well as the potential for that loss to spread elsewhere if you give in to demands). You think I'm kidding, but I would put good money on a bet that if it came down to brass tax and Valve or other digital publishers were told "let users 'own' their digital goods and sell them secondhand" would be the day those companies would close up shop in those areas. They would probably, eventually, reopen if and when they had a solution that met with the scope of the law, like
Sentenza
is saying some sort of GaaS model or one-time-only account-bound in-game purchase.