Stores sell commodity items all the time. There are a large range of products that are identical in price amongst all of the stores today.

This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time. Humble Bundle also allows games to be bought and sold to an extent. If you search there are lots of sites out there that sell Steam keys too. Steam doesn't just compete on price, they offer unique features such as their community features, existing userbase, and easy to use item markets as well. There are ways existing merchants entice you to buy commodity products today even if they have to sell them at the same price as other stores.

This model will likely be more fair to the content creator as they will likely get a larger portion of the profits, thought this is completely up in the air.

An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS (https://unisocks.exchange/) and Saint Fame (https://www.saintfame.com/). The price is dictated by the market itself instead of individual sellers.

>Stores sell commodity items all the time. There are a large range of products that are identical in price amongst all of the stores today.

A second hand store does not compare to a store selling new goods. Physical used goods are at least in some ways inferior and it's quite costly to resell them.

>This even exists to an extent today with video games with Steam allowing you to purchase gift copies and sell them to others as a later time

But you can't resell used games, that's the important point. It doesn't matter who buys the key, if you play the game, the author has been paid for your specific copy. If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author.

>An interesting use case for selling modern digital commodities are things like $SOCKS

I don't understand how books/games are comparable. These seem to have some actual commodity, which can't be easily shared, backing them.

>But you can't resell used games, that's the important point

Well, yeah, I said to an extent not exactly the same. That's also why I made my post. It is possible now.

>If resale is allowed, a single purchase of the original good could be played by potentially 100s of consumers (sequentially) without a single additional cent for the author

This argument applies equally to physical console games (Used copies sold at Gamestop and ebay) and physical books (Libraries and second hand bookstores). Those mediums didn't get destroyed by the reselling of the item after it was used.

Digital goods are always in perfect condition and can be trivially resold, while reselling physical goods takes way more effort, is mostly semi-locally restricted and the good gets damaged after usage.

e.g. if some guy from the other side of the world wants to sell their physical book to you, it's very likely cheaper, faster and more convenient to just buy a new copy.

It's like the difference between e-mail and mail. It's conceptually the same, but the lack of barrier causes it to behave completely differently.