I hope someone brings this before an American court, our 1st sale doctrine should apply.
You can resell your Steam games, says French court
- Thread starter Humza
- Start date
brucek
Posts: 1,727 +2,695
In the US they attempt to avoid First Sale by claiming there was no sale, there was instead a "license agreement."
However, from that point onward, the sellers typically act like they do in a sale, meaning they wash their hands of any ongoing support and claim their obligations were satisfied the moment they handed over the disc or download.
If someone ever really litigated it, or put it up to a public vote, I think they'd find it is more like a sale than a genuine "license agreement" negotiated between two willing partners, and our centuries old laws and practices regarding commerce ought to apply as they always have.
However, from that point onward, the sellers typically act like they do in a sale, meaning they wash their hands of any ongoing support and claim their obligations were satisfied the moment they handed over the disc or download.
If someone ever really litigated it, or put it up to a public vote, I think they'd find it is more like a sale than a genuine "license agreement" negotiated between two willing partners, and our centuries old laws and practices regarding commerce ought to apply as they always have.
They won't ditch the EU market. It would hurt them more than allowing reselling of software licenses.
Charging a fee to sell your license through their platform is acceptable, since they are a third party that facilitates the sale and provides security to both seller and buyer. But you should also have the option of just transferring your license to someone else. You know, like selling your old stuff via ebay vs a garage sale.
Ultimately this has nothing to do with protecting the EU economy, but rather about protecting consumer rights. Something that big companies have been borderline abusing for years now.
I don't know where your saltiness towards the EU is coming from, but you could also benefit from this in the future. Unless you own a boatload of Valve stock.
Because voluntarily losing a target audience of +500 million people somehow makes sense...
Reading between the lines the court ruling seems important simply for having the balls to call out "just because you call it a license doesn't automatically make it one when the sole underlying intention for doing that for normal consumer products sold as one-off purchases with no ongoing contract / payments is purely to try and skirt normal national First Sale Doctrine laws that protect consumers buying & selling owned products to artificially inflate demand for digital goods" bad EULA's for what they are.
m3tavision
Posts: 1,438 +1,222
[LEFT]Marketing BS won't matter as much. Think of how many Battlefield V games would've been re-sold the month after BF was released.... EA would have to learn to respect their customers. Because everyone would be trying their crappy games on used software and have no new retail sales, unless the game was good and a must have.
500k People buy BF, next month 300K people sell their BF game.[/LEFT]
This is the exact reason all these start-up nothing but developer apps are popping up everywhere. Worthless penny software.... that people pay to "try" unfinished software.
Now these 1-hit sellers, won't makes oodles of money on their cash-grab apps, because people will be able to buy said software used, from people who don't like it... so they can "try it out", (and/or) resale it to someone else, if they think the game/app is a hoax, etc.
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The courts have never been a big fan of shrink wraped agreements. I can see this as a good thing, the infastrutre is already in place thanks to trading cards on steam. Let people list their games for the price they want, valve gets a standard 10% just like Amazon and eBay. I know I'd love to sell some games I don't want anymore, like black ops 2.
This can't be enforced and it will not make Steam or other licence sellers change. Imagine Adobe allowing the resale of their software.
havok585
Posts: 343 +201
What I haven't seen mentioned is how toxic the idea is to developers, especially indie devs.
Traditional "trade used" mechanisms (like Game Stop) cut the developer/publisher out of the deal. When you're independent and make your yearly living income off your hopefully 10000~ digital copies of the games sold you took 2 years to make... a cut into that makes it much, much harder to sustain.
We live in an amazing ecosystem for games that bring us awesome small-studio and independent gems like Darkest Dungeon, Overcooked, Don't Starve, or Risk of Rain (that now has an amazing sequel, also I'm going to stop now because there's so many I've played and super enjoyed). There have been some crazy break-out successes, but for the most part, these games make just enough money to let the people who made them keep doing what they love.
With a physical copy (and why if you stop by a GameStop most of what you see is a much higher price than what you'd ever purchase it for on steam - or why games since SNES and Genesis era have been always in the $40+ range despite skyrocketing development costs, hell I bought Chrono Trigger for >$100) most of the money does *not* get back to the developer, a publisher is required, as well as a distributor and retailer. Because of this, those publishers will push marketing hard to get *new* copies in the hands of players, from deep pockets indie devs don't have. Most abandon their games after the first couple weeks, maybe up to a month, or when a new DLC is available, which you'd traditionally see trades of those games move up, until it moves to the back of the used-game store along with all games older than a few months. Publisher either makes its money back or not, then moves its attention to the next game.
That ecosystem does support used-game trading, one big push, success or fail, move on to next thing. Abandoning marketing abandons the product, it stops being printed, then the only method of acquiring the game is a used game sale.
This is not the ecosystem we're in with digital games. They're infinitely reproducible. This is why you can find lovely, inventive, entertaining gems at a very low price range, and you can see those games dramatically evolve when a success is higher than expected and the small developer can grow, reinvesting directly into their business (vs. the money going into a publishers deep pockets to be redistributed at their whim).
Steam already has a no-questions-asked refund police for when you don't like a game, which means if you didn't bother to get a refund, you must have enjoyed it to some extent. If you enjoyed it, and felt it was worth your money, why would you also feel entitled to profit off of it while simultaneously giving a digital-middle-finger to the people who made it in the first place and whose professional existence relies on its income? There's no wear and tear, there's no determent or risk to buying a cheaper "used" copy instead of whatever the listed price is, so of course if the option's available it will be chosen, which will be a direct hit to whoever made the game in the first place.
Traditional "trade used" mechanisms (like Game Stop) cut the developer/publisher out of the deal. When you're independent and make your yearly living income off your hopefully 10000~ digital copies of the games sold you took 2 years to make... a cut into that makes it much, much harder to sustain.
We live in an amazing ecosystem for games that bring us awesome small-studio and independent gems like Darkest Dungeon, Overcooked, Don't Starve, or Risk of Rain (that now has an amazing sequel, also I'm going to stop now because there's so many I've played and super enjoyed). There have been some crazy break-out successes, but for the most part, these games make just enough money to let the people who made them keep doing what they love.
With a physical copy (and why if you stop by a GameStop most of what you see is a much higher price than what you'd ever purchase it for on steam - or why games since SNES and Genesis era have been always in the $40+ range despite skyrocketing development costs, hell I bought Chrono Trigger for >$100) most of the money does *not* get back to the developer, a publisher is required, as well as a distributor and retailer. Because of this, those publishers will push marketing hard to get *new* copies in the hands of players, from deep pockets indie devs don't have. Most abandon their games after the first couple weeks, maybe up to a month, or when a new DLC is available, which you'd traditionally see trades of those games move up, until it moves to the back of the used-game store along with all games older than a few months. Publisher either makes its money back or not, then moves its attention to the next game.
That ecosystem does support used-game trading, one big push, success or fail, move on to next thing. Abandoning marketing abandons the product, it stops being printed, then the only method of acquiring the game is a used game sale.
This is not the ecosystem we're in with digital games. They're infinitely reproducible. This is why you can find lovely, inventive, entertaining gems at a very low price range, and you can see those games dramatically evolve when a success is higher than expected and the small developer can grow, reinvesting directly into their business (vs. the money going into a publishers deep pockets to be redistributed at their whim).
Steam already has a no-questions-asked refund police for when you don't like a game, which means if you didn't bother to get a refund, you must have enjoyed it to some extent. If you enjoyed it, and felt it was worth your money, why would you also feel entitled to profit off of it while simultaneously giving a digital-middle-finger to the people who made it in the first place and whose professional existence relies on its income? There's no wear and tear, there's no determent or risk to buying a cheaper "used" copy instead of whatever the listed price is, so of course if the option's available it will be chosen, which will be a direct hit to whoever made the game in the first place.
PEnnn
Posts: 1,285 +1,853
I guess. You do know there are 1/2 a billion people in the EU, right??
Ditching half a billion customer market or ditching a stupid, wrong and potentially illegal policy to begin with, is a no brainer.
But you seem to dislike the EU for being consumer friendly!
Darth Shiv
Posts: 2,371 +886
This is the crux of it. Valve wants to change the definition of licensing software purchases just because they provide a marketplace. The French court says get lost (as it should). Software companies don't dictate the law or EULAs that contradict the law.
m3tavision
Posts: 1,438 +1,222
Games are different than software.
m3tavision
Posts: 1,438 +1,222
Steam should be able to buy back all our games, for it's used price... and offer it to others.
Steam won't loose revenues, it is these sh!thouse developer's who put scams out there, and their companies should fold, but don't due to mass-marketing.
No Man's Sky... is a title & developer that should've gone bankrupt & disappeared. Instead, all they do is cloud the gaming world with white lies and string people along on hopes. So much People's money wasted...
What? How so? O_o
NMS may have had a bad launch, but nowadays it is praised as a success story of perseverance and how to turn things around. It's a very good game. Are you confusing it with Anthem or other crap that gets abandoned after a bad launch?
And steam would lose revenue if they allowed the resale of games. They get a percentage from the sale and sh products have a lower price, thus lower revenue. It would also mean that Steam would get money and the devs won't and I don't see devs agreeing to something like that, they will 100% demand a percentage.
m3tavision
Posts: 1,438 +1,222
Yeah, that is if you sell it back to Steam, who still has to compete with the open market. But yes, crummy games will get resold more often and those developers will not get a taste of the resale...
So the point is, these developers will have to have a good concept BEFORE starting development, instead of pretending they are a silicon programmers while they buss tables. Good products won't get resold quickly, thus more sales.
And yes, NMS is an utter flop.... bland, redundant and childish interaction/gameplay. It is not a game, it is a rabbit hole to see if people are actually this stupid. It's like you guys never played spore or other similar games before. NMS offers gamer's nothing but a promise that never is.
You clearly haven't played NMS in a very long time. But hey, if it isn't your preferred genre then nobody is forcing you to play it. I've seen people refer to Minecraft with the exact same "adjectives" and yet it still is very popular.
