Sweet, time to create a bunch of steam accounts, stock up on cheap games during steam sales, and then resell after the steam sale, undercutting the the "new" version (it's not like a digital resale is any lower quality than the "brand new" one). Rinse and repeat. Profit.
Yeah, and as a result, prices are going to be higher for everyone. No more 90% off steam sales like we currently get - that would just encourage profiteers to stock up on as many digital copies as possible in order to resell and undercut later.
And certainly no more "Celeste is free" type promos - that would be a feeding frenzy for profiteers.
People already do that, steam key resellers exist. I think you'll find it pretty hard to compete with professional scalpers as a one man operation. You're also banking on being able to sell the game for a smaller discount than the one on offer, later. It really doesn't strike me as a business that would be profitable.
I'd imagine Valve is going to have some sort of market fee to prevent shenanigans like this; they'll probably just slap this feature on their regular community market which already has a 5% transaction fee.
Edit: Or better yet just force sell price equal to at-time purchase price when it is bought off the steam store. The law just says they have to allow users to resell games, it doesn't say anything about allowing users to make a business off of it.
Or just let people do act as resellers of your product.
Presumably Valve is doing this hyper-low prices because they have the ability to and it makes the customers happy. They might decide to thumb their noses at everyone and say "okay fine, you guys are the secondary market now, figure it out yourselves, but we have no reason to give games away for free or sell them for 95% off"
