User blog comment:Lost Labyrinth/EA to go 100% digital. What does this mean for The Sims series and players?/@comment-1519608-20120922184742

Consider this. If you buy a physical version of a game, you can someday in the future turn around and sell that game, either to a person directly or to a used game retailer, and recoup at least some of the initial cost. This is especially useful if you buy a game and don't like it - since you can't usually return it to the retailer you bought it from, your only options are to keep the bad game and therefore "be out" the money you spent on it, or to sell it off and get at least part of your money back. It's really a great thing, and game publishers hate it.

Publishers don't want you to be able to sell your games... or, more accurately, they don't want others to be able to buy used games. They want everyone who plays a game to have to buy a fresh copy from them at full price. There are certain aspects of Copyright law that apply in this situation, and I won't get into the nuts and bolts of it, but essentially you as a customer have a right to sell off a product you've lawfully purchased. If you went to a store and bought a table, for instance, you could then decide to sell that table to someone else, and the original builder of the table cannot stop you - you have the right to re-sell. That same right exists with electronic media - movies, games, software programs, etc. As long as you bought the object legally (i.e. you didn't pirate it), you're legally allowed to sell it to someone else.

However, digital downloads don't quite work that way. The concept of digital downloads is so recent that copyright law is still working to catch up, and there isn't a lot of legal precedent to indicate that the same right to re-sell exists with that medium. So essentially, once you download a product you've purchased, you do not have the right to sell it to someone else. Some publishers take this a step further even, and limit the number of times you can install downloaded software! That's like you buying a table then being told by the table maker that you can only eat at it 5 times before you have to buy a new one.

The legality of all of this is still largely undecided, but there definitely is much more profit potential in going to a full-downloads model.