Here's a more reasonable (and likely) scenario for the sale of used digital games:
- Dev (/publisher) sets a 30-90 "no resale" period whereby used games cannot be traded (date from release, not purchase).
- Dev will set an initial "royalty fee" for the transaction that applies after the no resale period. This might be $40 on a successful AAA title, meaning that the seller will only receive the amount of purchase price beyond that amount (e.g., a $50 sale will net the seller $10).
- Dev will schedule royalty decreases up until a royalty floor (e.g. decrease $10 each 60 days until it hits $10, where it will stay forever).
This makes for a pretty good system for all parties:
- Buyers are able to purchase older games at reasonable discounts that reliably decrease over time.
- Sellers will be able to quickly, conveniently and reliably extract value from their used digital copies of games. Unlike Craigslist/eBay, there's no waiting for an auction to close, dealing with people trying to negotiate the price, wondering if the buyer will show up or pay.
- Developers will be able to recognize a revenue stream from used games, and won't have their full-price game sales completely undermined by the used game marketplace where a used copy is indistinguishable from a new copy.
On first glance, I know that many will think this is a rip-off for the sellers. They're selling their used game for $48, but getting only $8 in their pockets. However, I think that you need to take a second and consider the alternative: If all 3M copies of The Last of Us were out there in digital form, and anyone could sell their copy simply by checking a box on their game console, how much do you think your copy would really be worth? Certainly not the $30 you'll currently get for it on eBay. Only a small percentage of gamers are willing to go through the hassle of listing/selling/shipping their games, but many multiples of that number would be willing to do so if everything were automated and convenient. This would result in a flooded market, and price pressures would significantly decrease the value of your copy.
In a perfectly fluid market with limited scarcity, the real value of a used game is the amount that a person would be willing to forgo to maintain the opportunity to replay that game in the future. Frankly, I think that that price is probably about $5, and I think that's what you'd probably see in the system described above.