The VG Resource

The way Nintendo operates its digital transactions is often ridiculed, and for good reason. They've only recently implemented any kind of account system and are utterly unclear as to how that operates in regards to digital purchases, they don't offer cross-console ownership despite that being a relative norm these days, and they have something against giving gamers anything that they have not played one hundred times over. All kinds of solutions have been proposed as to how they can "fix" the problems, but this is one I haven't seen before:

Physical to Diital Trades.

Particularly with the DS supposedly coming to a Wii U near you, I think it might be worthwhile for Nintendo to look at the possibility of offering download codes to individuals who already own the physical game. I've thought about this a bit, and one of the big problems that pops up is how to make sure each game is only being granted one digital copy, and not circulating around a group of friends. Club Nintendo is one way of doing it, give Club Nintendo users a free digital copy of anything that they have registered to their account. I'm in strong support of that, actually.

But that only covers the Wii and DS generation (maybe the taile end of the GameCube). What about the N64, NES, and GB games?

I think Nintendo should allow users to mail in their carts in exchange for a free virtual console download. If I send them Super Mario Bros. for the NES, I should get 8-Bit Super Mario Bros. for the Virtual Console. While this would mean they couldn't resell the same game again to everybody, it would also grant them a lot of public blessing, I think.

Even big movie studios are taking a look at this concept by offering DVD/Blu-Ray to Digital conversions (albeit, at a small fee). There isn't really any reason for video games not to follow suit, and even do it better.

What do you think? Phys-to-Dig?

Businesswise, that seems like a really dumb move in general for a lot of companies, especially in this era of people only buying "licenses to play games" and not actually the games themselves.

Someone buys a physical copy of a game and owns one license to that game. Since they own a physical copy, they can do whatever they want with it. At the same time, you have that same game on your digital store, which people have to pay money for under normal conditions.

Yet they buy a physical copy, not a digital one, so you... give them a free digital license?
Why?
Yeah, they already spent money on your product, but they didn't spend it on the DIGITAL VERSION of that product.
That consumer could then turn around and resell the physical copy of that game (sans digital copy) to someone else (thus taking money out of your pocket since they bought the game from someone else and not you, the distributor) and recoup much of the cost of the game since they already own a full digital copy.

In other words, you get money for one copy, then lose out on a sale of a digital copy (because you gave it to the buyer for free) and then lose out on a sale of a physical copy because Buyer #2 bought theirs directly from Buyer #1.
Buyer 1 gets off with a free game and money in their pocket, while buyer 2 gets a cheap copy of the game. You, on the other hand, are left having lost money because you lost a sale of a digital copy as well as a sale of a physical copy. One step forward, two steps back.

Unless you somehow lock physical copies to one console per disc, ever, this would be a bad practice for a business.

As a consumer it's great, though.

edit- wait you were talking about trade-ins. IGNORE ME

The only way this would work is where the person has to post the physical version to Nintendo in order to get a code. But that's a lot of work for Nintendo for zero profit. And there's no guarantee the code will be compatible with the next Nintendo console, or even reusable if your current console is stolen etc.

Cross-platform purchases aren't the norm. It's only really Sony that does it. It's not like Nintendo isn't transparent about this, they make it clear that the game you are buying is locked to that system and that's it.