> Not everyone, they get zero money on resold used games

I'm not sure how to parse that. The people buying those used games _are_ paying for them; they're just not paying the original publisher. Just like they wouldn't for a used book, or cd, or whatever.

Also, in theory if everything is efficient, the publisher can still extract value from used game sales as that supports higher initial prices.

(Of course in practice platform owners are assholes and gamers are dumbasses so it's not even close to efficient.)

You parsed it just fine. Just like books, CDs or whatever, publishers don't like that. Hence you get frequent "revisions" of textbooks, online registration codes etc..

Relatedly reselling steam games or windows licenses have quite a few news stories to them.