A digital key is not the equivalent of "new in box merchandise". A digital key is a technical means by which to add a purchased item to your digital library. Th

A digital key is not the equivalent of "new in box merchandise". A digital key is a technical means by which to add a purchased item to your digital library. The ideal behavior is to not have a key at all but rather, once you purchase the item, to just have be added to your library automatically. That's the model that digital purchases are working towards. Physical merchandise exists before you purchase it. It costs money to produce, any unsold units are a negative for the company, there's a high overhead to buying a physical item in e.g. China and bringing it to the U.S., it's difficult for individuals to deal with large bulk amounts of physical items, and actually selling the items also involves physically transporting it to the buyer. All of this means it's rather difficult to do something like buy 1000 physical copies of a game in China for cheap and resell them to buyers in the U.S., or even to just buy 1000 physical copies of a game using stolen credit cards and then resell them. Digital keys on the other hand are ephemeral, they don't exist until you buy the product and they stop existing the moment you redeem it. The key is just to facilitate the process of going from purchase to having the game in your library. In some cases the keys are indeed separate entities you're allowed to resell (I'm thinking like you kickstart a game at a tier that gets you multiple digital copies, so they just send you several keys you can do whatever you want with), but that's not really the standard model. And yes, if you buy a game from a store and they give you a key, normally you are allowed to resell it, but there's usually limitations, such as games bought in China are supposed to be redeemed in China. And there are plenty of key sources, such as bundles, where you're not allowed to resell it at all, there's just no technical means of enforcing this (largely because services like Steam have no incentive to provide a technical means of limiting this; Steam doesn't care where you got the key, just that you put it in your library and thus increase usage of Steam).