France highest court declares Valve has to allow re-sale of games.

[kasuke06]

Imagine being outraged for having ownership over the products you buy. What a communistic idea.

Imagine wanting to sabotage an industry that's finally learned "deliver goods people want and they'll give you money without you having to resort to super shady shit to make sure you get enough money to stay afloat." because you want to make a quick buck.

[Wilian]

Imagine wanting to sabotage an industry that's finally learned "deliver goods people want and they'll give you money without you having to resort to super shady shit to make sure you get enough money to stay afloat." because you want to make a quick buck.

Super shady things like owning your products you pay for and then sell them forward when you don't. Only has existed ever since bartering was invented. God damnit.

[kasuke06]

Super shady things like owning your products you pay for and then sell them forward when you don't. Only has existed ever since bartering was invented. God damnit.

I was thinking more along the now almost guaranteed lines of small games with large amounts of DLC, story being locked behind it, pretty much cramming into it wherever you can, remember when games had that because it was a way for devs/publishers to get some money out of the then massive resale market where they get zero profit for their product? We're heading right back. Good job breaking it hero.

[Dundebuns]

Sounds good at first, but terrible with some critical thinking applied.

Software does not degrade over time like a physical product does. Regardless of whether the game has had 1, 2 or 30 owners before hand, a game resold this way will be the exact same quality as the original. This is why you can still sell new stuff with the resell market, because people like to have physical goods not owned by anyone before.

Also the pricing will be a race to the bottom. You'll undercut the cheapest price just to get rid of it, and before you know it the games are worth nothing. Developers will feel that hit and will start making oppressive subscription based and live service games.

[Firefall]

This absolutely would murder all indie game devs and I hope it is shot down in appeals and never happens in any country.

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People are really taking this to extremes. Do you really think Steam would let you sell your brand new $60 game for $1? If Steam adopts a resale system they would make sure they have full control. Hell, since there is essentially no difference between a new or used license they could just put the license back into their store and sell it as new. x% would go to Steam, x% would go to the publisher, and the user who 'sold' the license would be given a pittance, probably as store credit. The cogs keep turning, everything works essentially the same as before, but now you can earn a few bucks of Steam credit by getting rid of games you no longer play.

...Which you would then invest back into Steam games, making everyone (including those indie devs y'all keep whining about!) more money.

Or maybe, if for some reason they have to differentiate between "new" and "used" licenses, they hold on to the "used" licenses and use those for their Steam sales. The only scary thing about this ruling is that Steam might just say fuck it and instead start renting licenses.

Hopefully this.

[Wilian]

This absolutely would murder all indie game devs and I hope it is shot down in appeals and never happens in any country.

Just like resale of products has killed every single other industry it has been part of.

[Firefall]

Just like resale of products has killed every single other industry it has been part of.

False equivalence here and you know it. A licence cannot be damaged and lasts forever. And Steam doesn't even own the games they sell. And indie devs are not "the industry."

[szechuan]

This absolutely would murder all indie game devs and I hope it is shot down in appeals and never happens in any country.

Yet there were plenty of studios that started out as Indies and have completely survived those Horrible Used Games.

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False equivalence here and you know it. A licence cannot be damaged and lasts forever. And Steam doesn't even own the games they sell. And indie devs are not "the industry."

Not at all, Blu-Rays are built to last. Indie Devs are "the industry", Just because they are Independent doesn't mean they get Special Treatment from Platforms.

[Gorsameth]

Yup, they're just going to have to make everyone's lives way more shitty for it, way to go guys, I was enjoying this "businesses have to make a worthwhile product that they feel will convince me to part with my hard earned money" instead of returning to being nickel and dimed to extreme annoyance because they're not seeing a penny of the massive amounts of resale.

Way to go beaurocrats in a foreign country forcing your views on everyone!

You seem to have been really quick in forgetting Star Wars Battlefront 2.

Companies don't decide not to exploit you more tomorrow because you didn't complain about being exploited today.

[KrayZ33]

How will they implement this?
"Remove Key from Libary"? - or something like that?

On top of that, who's to stop developers putting up accounts that require key input for their games.
I can already see that you will have to get steam to remove your key and make it available again, then some kind of third party programm to remove the key and then you have to trust the dude you are buying from to actually do it and not give up because it's a hassle.

Meh.

[Ballistic]

Nice insult buddy, but no. You seem to suck at thinking logically, because if you REALLY think that you can just resell a game for a DOLLAR after a week, you are out of your fucking mind. If anything, ANY STORE PLACE will have a system in place that will prevent the reselling of new games for less than a MINIMUM price (Paid 70$ for a game? Cant sell it under 60 for this time frame). Those time frames can EASILY BE SET by both distributor AND publisher. If anything, this shit is completely exaggeration.

First I have never said after week you said it second, you assumed it will be a third party for reselling keys and most likely it won't be it has to be under Steam nose the purchases, third you are assuming that Steam or in your case third party websites setting rules to minimum resale value? under which law or rule they do that? they are protecting who? the gaming companies from setting the resale value of their games? or protecting gamers while they are selling their used games to give the best value of payback? there no such service for free Kiddo if something ever like this established 100% they want a cut from the money you get later. Which defeat the purpose of the case that you own the game and it became property to you and you have the full freedom to keep it or sell it as you like.

Fourth, the whole point that you quote was about indie developers, try to organize your thoughts and argue me point by point, I can't imagine how you sit in exams trying to organize your thoughts to answer questions if you're spewing random thoughts in one paragraph.

Since I have to be captain obvious and be called for it but I will bite it and since you clearly suck economy also (math was first, god knows how many subjects you fail at your school !!) Imagine yourself.. average Joe bought an indie game day 1 for 20 $, you finished it in month or so now you want to sell it, now imagine there are 50k gamers trying to sell it for say about 15$, you want to get rid of it quickly the more the game sit in your library the more its value goes down. So you undercut them by 1$ then they start to do the same to you, of course, if the game has high demand and popular every steam user is winner they all will sell their copies and it is a matter of supply and demand, but if not, everyone wants to dump his game as soon as possible at any given price.

The popularity of the game, number of copies sold and are willing to resell it, the original price tag of the game, the release date of the game and the value of the game in sale (although as I said before there is no benefit of sales if this implemented) will determine the prices of used copies some will stay high some will go cheap as dirt. So yes some users are willing to sell indie games cheap, there is no much room to wiggle in the price there since most indie games don't go above 20~40$. To go back to my original post... all these purchases goes under the nose of the Indie companies and Steam they have no right to get a cut from these since they already got it from they initial buyer otherwise they can be sued for grabbing any penny from that, it will be the demise of many indie companies.

Goddayum Sherlock, you found out that physical copies cost money to make! Hey guess what: they still are sold for the same price both physical and digital either way, it doesn't matter. I've NEVER PAID LESS for a digital version of a game, even if I could have bought it physical at my local Media Markt. People following the trend and buying shit on day 1 is a whole other issue, that people made for themselves, falling for hypetrains and other stuff.

Of course you have to sell your account for this right now. I fail to see your point here with your baseless insult. You are so stuck with your goddamn "PEOPLE WILL SELL GAMES FOR A DORRAH ERRRMAHHGEERRRD!", I think you have a fucking problem if you really believe that this will be the case.

Since I have to be Sherlock and feed you facts with a spoon, my original post if this only targeted Steam initially and it stayed like this for a long time it will keep AAA companies from Steam. Heck, they might go to Epic store exclusive to skip this shit, these companies are biting the bullet of the physical copies on consoles being resold over and over with 0 benefits to them other than introducing loot boxes and cosmetic shit to compensate. Companies don't want another war front to fight against. So most likely you will find more exclusive games to consoles than PC.

And again, you rather insult me for being bad at math, while not thinking logically, that both steam and publishers can have restrictions on resells. If anything, people selling a brand new game for a DOLLAR is complete nonsense. Get your head out of your ass and start to THINK logically.

Read above, it is the supply and demand of sold keys... I can't predict the value of each game being resold, but yes some games can go to that price depend on many variables mentioned above. used keys will always be below sales price datum, Some kids have more than 200 games in their library most of them they stopped playing them, try to think in his mind how easy fast cash they want to get like 200$ or more to buy new GPU or CPU.

Ah yes, an account that just starts selling all the games it has - if you buy a game from an account that has its whole library up for sale, MAYBE you should think for yourself and say "huh... thats kinda strange and seems fishy" and rather report the account instead? If you think that this seems like an unsolvable problem, no it is not. If anything, an account that does this is rather suspicious and probably gets banned extremely quickly if enough people actually care to report it.

And I'm the one who thinks illogical here, This will be fun to argue because you clearly don't think ahead before you post funny stuff like this, So you are saying Steam introduces a new feature of selling used keys, kids who want easy cash or people got older with responsibilities and they are not playing at all and want to sell their whole libraries should be all reported because it looks fishy to you (since they got caught in the middle and look like hacked accounts) ? I'm sure Steam support will love you as their manager with your easy solutions...actually they will burn you on stake LOL. Can you imagine the amount of reports Steam will get if they follow your advice?

Yes illogical andy, you figured it out: Blizzard and other companies promote more security, because people were stupid and got hacked. The difference: a lot of companies give you the option for free nowadays, while blizzard sold an authenticator before smartphones were a common thing for most people. Thats a real shocker right here.

Who the hell brought up if the authenticator is free or not? I don't know what this has to do with what I said previously. I was giving an example that most companies now promoting to authenticators because many people are clueless when it comes to the protection and security of their accounts. It eases the life of the Support staff to deal with the swarm of hacked accounts. Hackers follow the money if there is money involved in steam libraries they target it more. I was giving an example..Jeez, that also totally went over your head.

Again, you are missing the point. Publishers will ALWAYS look for ways to make ALL THE MONEY. Funny that you pick the biggest pieces of shit in the industry to make an example, when most of their games in the last 2 years mostly were "behind expectations" in terms of sales and other things, because people started to not give a fuck about EA anymore. It turns out, people already have enough of this shit and if publishers/companies decide to go even harder, it will just hasten their downfall with newer regulations, customers not buying the games and other things. We already see the effect of lootboxes.

If anything, the people who STILL buy those games are to blame. People who STILL invest money into said games are a much bigger problem than the reselling of a game.

To sum it up, we are screwed anyway because of these greedy ass companies anyway, so please let me cash out my Steam library because I'm in dire need of this money, whatever the aftereffect of these companies towards us it was going to happen anyway... Sure dude, enjoy your money out of thin air.

[szechuan]

...and we want more aggressive methods introduced to the gaming industry because cheap ass kid wants 1$ out of his paid 60$ game.

Plenty of Publishers/devs etc... in The Game industry, have ALWAYS been aggressive in pushing/creating MTX trends and even some have pushed MTX regardless of rules and regulations recently shown like Blatantly lying about ESRB ratings.

Microsoft is also one of the main reasons why people have to pay $$$ to even play online on consoles.

[kasuke06]

You seem to have been really quick in forgetting Star Wars Battlefront 2.

Companies don't decide not to exploit you more tomorrow because you didn't complain about being exploited today.

Did YOU forget about battlefront 2? the absolute shitstorm from consumers is what got it changed. Not some bureaucrat with a bug up their ass.

[Gorsameth]

Did YOU forget about battlefront 2? the absolute shitstorm from consumers is what got it changed. Not some bureaucrat with a bug up their ass.

Your trying to claim that consumer protection is causing companies to go for more and more extreme forms of extracting money from consumers, when its clear that companies are doing so regardless.

[kasuke06]

Your trying to claim that consumer protection is causing companies to go for more and more extreme forms of extracting money from consumers, when its clear that companies are doing so regardless.

Got it one outlier(which got changed by consumer outcry, despite your entire disingenuous platform being they just absolutely steamroll over what their consumers want chasing that almighty dollar that no one will give them if they don't like the product. Which is so goddamned stupid, I'm wondering if you go out with a special helmet over your tinfoil hat!) disproves the whole argument.

So how's macron going to deal with that guillotine? I mean the french do just execute their leaders if they don't like them and those protests are still ongoing, non? That's how you're arguing.

[LuminaL]

Yikes.

Remember, this is a license. If you sell your license to someone else, you no longer own the license so you can no longer play the game. Were Steam to adopt a re-sell model, you can sure as hell bet that the game would be deactivated from your library once you sold it. It is extremely unlikely that one license will be sold and re-sold that many times.

Further, this is a digital marketplace that Steam would have control over. I'm not 100% clear on EU law, not being in the EU and all, but unless it states the consumer must get 100% of the profits of a resale (which seems doubtful) Steam could take a percentage of the resale and even send some over to the developer. I bet they could even do something similar to a MAP price to prevent brand new games from being resold at drastically reduced prices by users.

Regardless, the market survived when we could resell physical games. It would definitely survive if we could resell digital games, especially when there is so much more retailer (Steam) control.

Of course, I don't expect Steam to bend to this. It's more likely buying game licenses becomes renting game licenses with bullshit subscription fees and stuff so... /shrug

the problem is not steam not making anything out of it. its that Epic shit is already pushing on steam and if this also happens, not only steam, but PC gaming overall will be shit on by publishers and they will find radical ways to suck more money out of the costumers by for example making games Sub based like how WoW already is so even if you sell your game to someone else, they still have to pay monthly to play the game. and nobody wants that.

[Kneth]

Just to make this completely clear for everyone.

This doesn't mean that Valve must allow people to sell their individual games that they have on steam. The court ruling was against a couple of points in their TOS, one of them being that you're not allowed to sell your account (real world trading) and you will be punished for doing so.

This just means that valve can no longer do anything about people selling accounts, if you wanna sell your 10 year old account with 100+ games to some random guy on the internet you're free to do so and can't be punished for it.

The ruling was against their TOS, not the inability to sell individual digital games.

[Rennadrel]

People are really taking this to extremes. Do you really think Steam would let you sell your brand new $60 game for $1? If Steam adopts a resale system they would make sure they have full control. Hell, since there is essentially no difference between a new or used license they could just put the license back into their store and sell it as new. x% would go to Steam, x% would go to the publisher, and the user who 'sold' the license would be given a pittance, probably as store credit. The cogs keep turning, everything works essentially the same as before, but now you can earn a few bucks of Steam credit by getting rid of games you no longer play.

...Which you would then invest back into Steam games, making everyone (including those indie devs y'all keep whining about!) more money.

Or maybe, if for some reason they have to differentiate between "new" and "used" licenses, they hold on to the "used" licenses and use those for their Steam sales. The only scary thing about this ruling is that Steam might just say fuck it and instead start renting licenses.

I think this is the ideal situation. Games don't degrade over time in digital format, the availability is technically limitless for that reason. I wouldn't mind being able to offload some of my Steam library and get some credit towards a new game.

[Wilian]

I think this is the ideal situation. Games don't degrade over time in digital format, the availability is technically limitless for that reason. I wouldn't mind being able to offload some of my Steam library and get some credit towards a new game.

I bought books 25 years ago. Those are still in perfect condition. Where's the degragation? If anything the value has gone up as those are original prints.

[Easo]

They're just going to pay the fine people, nothing is going to change.

You see, nothing stops EU making adjustments to law in cases like these - Valve repeats this, gets 10 times the fine. Next time - 100.
EU made Microsoft and Intel pay fines in billions. Valve is nothing compared to that.

And before some smartass decides to say "But Valve will just leave the market!". No. No they will not. No one is that stupid to miss out on the second biggest market in the world.

Yeah, how dare we allow people to simply take their business elsewhere and leave it up to the businesses to adapt or die instead of trying to nanny-state your whole fucking life for you. What's next? Need daddy macron to tell you smoking is bad so we're stealing your right to a slow, horrifying death? Oh wait then we'll need to get rid of that insidious poison known as alcohol! And... you know, you really shouldn't be playing videogames anyways they're just a waste of time when you could be helping others!

I pity you, for you are hopeless. Well, I guess the corporation propaganda over the decades has paid off...