Following on from the company’s somewhat shocking announcement that it was going to allow cross-platform play Microsoft have surprised me yet again by shoving out a survey asking if gamers would be willing to sell back their digital games.

“If the console digital games store for the console you owned offered customers the option to ‘sell back’ their digital games to the store for 10 per cent of the purchase price in store credit, would you be interested in such an offer?” Asked the survey, which has popped up on Reddit.

It’s a fascinating question, not least because you can’t actually “sell” a digital game as such, since there’s nothing physical to hand back to Microsoft. Your license for the game would simply be revoked, and Microsoft wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.

So why make this offer if they don’t get anything out of it? Presumably Microsoft hope that if you you get in-store credit you’ll be tempted to add a little bit of your own cash to it to pick up another game, thus if you return The Division that you bought for the full price of £55 you’ll get £5.50 back and might be tempted to add another £4.50 from your own bank account to snag something on sale.

Of course 10% is a bit low. I’d rather see a 20% return, but Microsoft will want to keep the number as low as possible to help encourage gamers to break out the ‘ol credit card.

There’s a lot of questions that need to be answered and details that need to be worked out yet, such as whether the 10% return is based upon the price you bought the game for or its current market value, but this is still a fascinating prospect.