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Steam should let users resell games, French court rules
- Thread starter Deleted member 15428
- Start date
This very much should be they way digital goods work, but you can bet publishers and developers will look for every way under the sun to stiffle this.
Subs and explicit licenses will be the way forward if this continues. Which, as far as GaaS goes, will probably be just fine for a lot of devs.
Subs and explicit licenses will be the way forward if this continues. Which, as far as GaaS goes, will probably be just fine for a lot of devs.
I'm taking "season pass" here to mean a license that contains a set amount of DLC. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, for example, the season pass will never expire.
Publishers need to start making these things expire to not have to comply with this judgement.
Open the flood gates then!
As soon as they pass it for Steam, Nintendo/Sony/MS/GOG/Apple/Android all can't be far behind. Done with that app you bought on the iPhone? Sell it!
Bad news is, by the time this law passes, no one will be selling games anymore. Just subscriptions.
As soon as they pass it for Steam, Nintendo/Sony/MS/GOG/Apple/Android all can't be far behind. Done with that app you bought on the iPhone? Sell it!
Bad news is, by the time this law passes, no one will be selling games anymore. Just subscriptions.
Then yeah, sure, I have no problem selling that.
It'd be like selling a game of the year edition of a disk that had extra content on it.
Microsoft absolutely did not want to do that. Nothing stopped Microsoft from implementing such as system for their digital storefront. They don't even have a system that's comparable to Steam Family Sharing.
The ability to sell your discs back to Gamestop for an even smaller pittance than now (and no private selling) rightfully didn't appeal to anyone.
Like what? Can you provide an example?
I am philosophically opposed to the idea that customers should be deprived of some of their basic rights because of the possibility of publishers fucking up gaming even more. I consider it a form of blackmail, so to speak.
I dont see how it's any worse for them than physical resale, which seems like it would be the same argument
They still get a cut of the sale I'd suspect. They have a much better chance with digital resale than physical resale, that's for sure.
I don't believe that me saying "publishers and developers will have to adapt to the new status quo" is the same as saying that the market will figure it out. I am a strong believer in government regulation of capitalist markets.
User banned (5 days): trolling
They might actually have to start making games again
Valve could probably take a cut if they had some sort of setup in Steam to handle the sale.
How devs/publishers handle this is the big question.
I don't think so. The gaming market is extremely frontloaded, even when you can get games cheaper in a few days/weeks/months. Something like this would probably be restricted to one regional market so buying cheaper keys to make a profit would be limited (or regional pricing will just stop). The only way you're really affected by this is if your game has sold a big amount of copies, which means that you've find success already.
Sharing in a small circle might be a little issue though.
My point is that you're assuming that the new status quo will be as sustainable for developers and publishers as it is now. The "new status quo" could very well just be a completely fucked up game industry (see werezompire's) post above.
That would only be possible if every game on Steam was forced to have extremely intrusive DRM, which they don't. The CS:GO/Dota 2 marketplace only works because those games are always online.
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Yeah they're probably taking cuts like when selling the trading cards and selling in-game items but I don't see us able to set our own prices, that's gonna mess up their own market and their saledeals and folks reselling 60 dollar games for a fraction sounds like a nightmare for them.
Why would anyone buy a digital game new? It'll always be more expensive.
That is indeed true, I am assuming that it will be sustainable.
If anything, Valve gets to be the "GameStop" in this used goods scenario. They take a percentage of every transaction as they would be best placed to be the controller of the process. They might well make out decently in the deal. It's pubs and devs that would bear the brunt of the change.
The difference is that a digital resell market would be frictionless. Physical resale isn't instant (gotta ship it or pick it up in person), there's additional costs (shipping, reseller's cut, etc.), you have to find someone selling the used copy (and since there's hassle involved, fewer people are going to be willing to resell), and there's degradation & risk with used copies (disk might be weakened, box/materials might be missing or damaged, game might be lost or damaged in the mail, buyer might claim that the game is defective when it's not and try to get a refund, etc.). There's a reason why Gamestop is able to do a lot of used game business despite offering pathetic rates for used games - they remove some of the friction, compared to selling your used games directly. With digital resales, ALL friction would be gone & EVERYONE would be selling their used games that they no longer play & EVERYONE would be buying used games since they would be identical but cheaper.
It would be a disaster for the game industry AND in the end, it would be a disaster for players because companies would just outright stop selling games and make them exclusive to subscription services.
But they already take a large percent of every transaction. I feel like end users wouldn't be comfortable with spending 30% to Valve for each resell. Also, since individual users have no incentive to keep a game's value high, they'd be constantly undercutting each other to sell faster and the resell value of games would plummet rapidly - drastically faster than your average dev/publisher who puts their game on a specific discount schedule with slowly escalating discounts the longer the game has been out.
...Any kind of paid software license? Can you resell your copy of Windows?
lol. "Basic rights"? We're talking about entertainment product, not clean water.
Because it'll be just like gamestop, and according to EU law, devs/publishers cannot recieve money from used game sales.
Because in order to have a used digital game you would need someone to buy a copy and then sell it. That means that there's always going to be a delay between the release of the game and any widespread used games version. Since the gaming market is front loaded, it wouldn't really affect day 1/ week 1 buyers that much. You're also working under the assumption that most people would end up selling their license, which I don't think is true. It will probably be harder to sell your games for a very long period of times though but most of the revenue would be safe.
Yeah, thinking about it, wouldn't it be pretty bad for devs / pubs when people can just wait a few days for people to start selling their game codes on ebay or other places and constantly undercutting each other with cheaper prices than just buying the game new on Steam or any other store? Maybe subscriptions are the way forward? I don't know how Valve could chase that idea when they have 30k games though.
Actually you can lmao. Use the key on your machine and then it deactivates whomever used it last.
I feel like if they made supporting this mandatory on individual games we'd see perhaps more consumable games. That is, once you start it, you can never start it again. The game you buy is good for one play through. Basically would destroy used market before it started. Also exclusive availability through subs as others have said. Regardless, it'll mean pubs and devs making changes to the products the sell and the way they're delivered, and probably ones that are strictly negative from a player perspective.
And this was the crux of the second hand games sale conundrum. Digital re-sale would create an industry of enterprising middle-men who would sell you a recent title for an amount of nearly recent titles. They get a surplus of in-demand games they can sell at a sliver under the going RRP, massive ecosystem of games transactions without involving the publisher.
It is why games are designed to try to keep you to retain them. Day One DLC (your £ investment makes you less likely to sell), DLC roadmap (don't sell the game or else you miss out), or as we see now Live Services (the game keeps on, you never sell it).
Well, that's the point. I think i should be able to resell my copy of Windows.
Basic customer rights, not basic human rights.
They can't. After the initial sale they have no rights to a percentage from subsequent sales
Why wouldn't the online pass also be resealable under this logic?
Hmm, is that legal? Maybe my example wasn't the best then, but there's plenty of software that isn't resellable per the software maker's TOS.
The thing I don't quite understand is why this is any different then how the physical market already works. All of the things that people mention that would be disruptive (undercutting price etc) are things that existed in the physical market yet the industry was still able to survive.
Well we're all just going down the rabbit hole of speculating hypotheticals on top of other hypotheticals. Maybe Valve creates are marketplace that easily allows selling games between Steam users, but doesn't specifically force sales to go through this marketplace.
That is a feature for upgrading system components or PCs not for software resale tho.
e:didn't have the 2nd quote
Oh yeah probably not allowed by TOS, but it happens anyways and honestly microsoft doesn't care because they make their bank on Volume keys.
We're talking about a right to digital property. It's a pretty basic and important question in the modern world. The implications are a lot bigger than "lol it's just a video game."
And yeah, seeing as there are communities in the US that can't even get a right to clean water, I'd say basic property rights questions remain open to interpretation.