Yeah, I guess the used games market is pretty crazy compared to most things. I'd never sell myself (with extremely few exceptions), but I'm not sure of a reasonable way to prevent that resale I guess. I wouldn't have minded the Xbox One's solution if not for the online check and rendering the disk useless.
Well, I mean, in essence the bolded -was- their solution to the problem. They tied the physical and digital together so tightly that they were one and the same, which in turn forced draconian DRM and turned the physical into a coaster.
That is to say, you can't remove those two things and still have MS's 'solution', since that really was their solution. The only way to prevent people from reselling the physical once they install the digital is to coasterize the physical, and the only way to prevent people from reselling the digital is to have the physical simply force install the digital and then, once again, coasterize the physical. Coasterizing the physical, in turn, requires constant online checks. Their 'solution' the only real way to prevent the issues I outlined a post ago... it just so happens to also be awful, draconian, and anti-consumer and should never have left the blackboard, let alone been implemented.
I don't care if I can't sell the code/game somehow, but I need to be able to use both disk and digital version and at least one of them needs to survive the death of your online service.
Many people do care -- first sale doctrine is a cornerstone of our consumer rights and copyright law... people (obviously) don't take kindly to corporate attempts to undermine it.
Additionally, as mentioned, the only* way to link the digital and physical would need to include online checks (otherwise the physical could be sold) so it can't survive 'the death of your online service' any more than a purely digital can.
[Technically, you could have some ridiculous chip on the physical that got written to by the first machine you put it in, perhaps with the serial number and account name of the user... but that would be it's own pandora's box of unintended consequences].
Fortunately, I don't fear that Sony's servers will go down. It's a very profitable service, and I'd think that even if Sony had major issues PSN/PS would be sold off and maintained. I can't think of a realistic scenario in which it's straight up shut off in my lifetime. I feel like that would require an economic shift so large that we wouldn't be worried about video game services anymore. The brunt of the costs of setting up the store/psn have long been paid for... so maintaining a barebones server solution to allow sales/downloads [even if Sony was long gone] would likely always be a profitable venture due to the back catalog's value.
