A couple of days ago a question was raised on Friendfeed. The issue was what would happen to the pre-owned market of media such as movies, games and music when they are all digital in the future. This is of course assuming that digital downloads will replace all physical media.
First of all I don’t think all physical media will disappear, just as much as there are still vinyl records being sold and retro videogames. Collectors always want to have the physical product to have in ther hands and put in a display. I do think however that most of the mainstream sales of media will become digital. Steam, the games distribution channel of Valve is an excellent example of how this could and should work. In it you only need to enter your bought product key and it will register the game to you. You then can download the game and play. When you login on another computer the game is still registered to you and you can download and install it again. Downloading is a bit slow though, maybe they should have used some bittorrent solution. That would have made the system a lot cheaper for them too.
But on the trading of second-hand games, movies and music, I think there are two sides to it. On one hand you should be able to sell your old games and stuff. That currently is one of the best ways to get cool games for a low price and have been for a long time. You also want to swap with your friends. On the other hand this seems a little bit silly with a digital product. Why would it disappear from you computer only because it has now also gone to your friends computer. And maybe the most important point. To create and maintain such a system there needs to be some sort of digital rights system in place which we have some pretty bad experiences with.
I have embedded the question on Friendfeed below. What do you think, should there be a way to swap and sell your digital media or not?
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