From the article: "Hoarding is a disorder characterized by difficulty in parting with possessions" and this is key, "Digital hoarders often will cite an emotional attachment or a sentimental value to files they collect — including photos or email exchanges — associated with their own life experiences or with people in their lives. In such cases, he says, anticipating difficulty coping with feelings that accompany a permanent loss of these items becomes a barrier to controlling their hoarding behavior." The mental disorder comes from the difficulty of parting with those possessions because the individual is tying emotional response to them. Have you ever tried to remove an object that you consider trash from a person that is hording? It's going to be a really bad time and a massive emotional roller coaster for everyone. This article made more sense to post than the original one from PC Gamer. I do wish consultants and experts would stop labeling people with disorders because of anecdotal evidence or trying to have some kind of shock value. It starts associated people of a massive community with a mental disorder too. If someone deleted my steam library, I would be upset, but not on the actual level of an person that hordes. You ever see the show "Hoarders"? It's extremely sad and painful to watch. That's not to say digital horders don't exist on steam. The moment they lose a game and start freaking out beyond "i just lost money", that person needs professional help.

"Oops. The healthy salad got corrupted. Guess it's just steak. ‍️"

I'll just find another torrent tracker where its improved 1.5 version is available.

Buying an indie platformer that you might not play is not anywhere close to actual IRL hording. And it's not even what is being described as digital hording in that article from UCLA. It's straight up irresponsible to compare it to an actual hording mental disorder. Like, you must not have ever experienced that in any capacity to think that. Although, surely digital horders have some cross over. The prevalence of people not playing a game they bought on discount ain't it fam.

You've got a lot of nerve being right

Hey if I could sell a million copies of a game for just a dollar each as my cut of a bundle, well I’d be a millionaire!

Walled gardens create digital plantations

Expanding on that, and explaining why this is not Digital hoarding, I have a HUGE catalog of games, lots of which came from bundles and such, if I was able to sell back games to steam, even if for a few cents, I would delete a big chunk of that. But as is I have no reason to do it, I can put them in a "never played" category and forget about them until I randomly find a game in the store that mildly interests me and notice it's already in my library.

Can this business model survive a recession?

Completely agree. I think maybe digital hoarding can be real when it gets to the point where people are buying excessively to the point that they cannot afford it, but hoarding disorder would typically be associated with physical goods that are cluttering your space to dysfunctional levels.