French court rules that Valve must allow for Steam users to resell their digital games

Engezerstorung · Sep 20, 2019

Jiehfeng said:
Do consumers really have such a right in this regard though? It is a license, permission to use.
Have you ridden those horses in the parks that you pay a few bucks to go a few rounds? You don't own that horse, you're just allowed to use it with the conditions set. You can't really sell your permission to ride the horse to another person, the permission was given to you by the condition of a full purchase made, only to you.

Foxi4 said:
I see the problem. You are under the impression that, at any stage, you own *the actual game*, code, assets et all. You do not - you own the license to use said game. You are not "selling the game", the license to use said game is transferred from you to another person for a nominal fee. Ownership of the actual item is never in question here - the developer/publisher/copyright holder own the game, you own the right to use it, and that right is both permanent and transferable. This is wholly different from receiving a service from a third-party. A rancher owns the horse and provides a service, namely horse riding. You are given a set amount of time during which you can ride the horse in a designated area, and do just that. At no point you are "licensed" to do anything, the rancher renders a service that you take advantage of. There are no "permissions" here, you're not leasing the horse for your own purposes, you are using the horse for the purpose designated by the rancher.

@Jiehfeng and the "you can't really sell", well what you can or cant do depend on what the law say, if the law dont put any limits on what conditions the owner of the horse can make, then yeah the owner can say that you cant resell your ride ticket, but also the law could say that its in a consummer right to do so, and then the owner of the horse would have no other choice than to comply (or could try to bluff his way in this by making you think you cant resell your ticket while you have in fact a legal right to do so; and thats why sometimes company are called to court because they made illegal ToS and stuff)
Like its like now sometime when you buy a train ticket its nominative and you need to prove your identity so you cant resell it, but some years ago it wasnt, so you could resell it/ give it to someone you knew.
And thats also why to avoid some abuse they often put a mention "cant be sold" on press copy of game, invitation tickets of music event, and stuff like that, so people dont sell back stuff non-nominative stuff they didnt bought in the first place

and thats also something steam and co could put in place to avoid g2a abuse who sell review copy and stuff, they could be "key for press review content, can't be re-sold once activated"

there is sooo much things that can be put in place to prevent obvious abuse if you take your time to think about it
the argument of but if we "if we "extreme implementation in the worst way of a something" then its going to be the apocalypse", is the scare tactic we see everywhere to kill stuff that dont please the "economic liberalism" that fck up people rights

Roamin64 · Sep 20, 2019

ThoD said:
Sure, it "makes sense" to allow people to buy things on Steam with stolen money then sell the games effectively using Steam to launder their illegal cash like they do with G2A or for people to pay 1€ for a bundle then sell the games at their normal price making 100€ in return /s

What the fuck are you saying ? Wether the money is stolen or not changes absolutely nothing. If we go by your logic , nobody can ever sell anything for a profit ? Are you saying that valve is not making profit with the games that they are selling us ? That's how life works , you acquire things at a certain price and sell them for profit.

Foxi4 · Sep 20, 2019

To play the devil's advocate, I can understand the concern that developers would see diminished profits as a result of implementing a resale policy. However, I think we can have our cake and eat it. There is absolutely nothing stopping Valve from charging a nominal fee for using the Community Marketplace, much like eBay charges for hosting auctions on the website. If a set portion of the "profit" goes towards the developer, they could in fact see some additional profit, particularly in the Indie sphere, coming from users who wouldn't normally pay full retail price for the title, but would happily purchase a "pre-owned" copy. This also opens the doors to new users purchasing DLC for the games they found to be "good deals" on the marketplace, adding a secondary revenue stream. We're talking about making some money versus making no money here, that doesn't sound like a bad deal. If implemented correctly, this could work for everyone involved.

Xzi · Sep 20, 2019

Will be very interesting to see how this unfolds and how fast the fallout from this decision hits other tech companies if it's upheld, that's for sure. Given how quickly the Steam trading card market crashed with a similarly 'unlimited' supply, however, I think people should probably temper their expectations on what the resale value of any particular game might be.

odeon · Sep 20, 2019

Bladexdsl said:
how are you supposed to resell your digital games than...just through steam? and how will you be paid...with cards and gems? yeah fuck that

Doesn’t take much imagination to figure out a system for resale. Just need an option in steam to convert a game to a key. Then you can sell the key however you like or even give it to a friend. The other party then redeems the key on steam.

GilgameshArcher · Sep 20, 2019

Hells Malice said:
Well this won't be endlessly abused and lead to significant problems, especially with a huge rise in steam account compromising leading to a ton of innocent people becoming victims of stolen games.

No definitely not.

Definitely wasn't a legitimate reason digital media has historically not had something this stupid be possible.

But all those ppl that lost their account was not due to their own mistakes? (ex: bad password, not updating their client and falling into scams...)

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

tranceology3 said:
Go ahead, enforce these laws. It will be obsolete in 5-10 years when all games are streamed from servers and you never "own" the games Think of it like, can you resell your Netflix movies?

Play all game with absurd lags??? I will never accept that, I can spent the rest of my life replaying only what is there now.

Flame · Sep 20, 2019

Rockstar already regrets making a windows store front.

Jonna · Sep 20, 2019

Foxi4 said:
To play the devil's advocate, I can understand the concern that developers would see diminished profits as a result of implementing a resale policy. However, I think we can have our cake and eat it. There is absolutely nothing stopping Valve from charging a nominal fee for using the Community Marketplace, much like eBay charges for hosting auctions on the website. If a set portion of the "profit" goes towards the developer, they could in fact see some additional profit, particularly in the Indie sphere, coming from users who wouldn't normally pay full retail price for the title, but would happily purchase a "pre-owned" copy. This also opens the doors to new users purchasing DLC for the games they found to be "good deals" on the marketplace, adding a secondary revenue stream. We're talking about making some money versus making no money here, that doesn't sound like a bad deal. If implemented correctly, this could work for everyone involved.

Liked because it's the only solution I've seen that would actually help indie Devs while simultaneously giving consumers their rights back. Couldn't care about the mainstream devs, but the solo devs pouring their heart into a charming game deserve as much profit as they can potentially get.

Foxi4 · Sep 20, 2019

Jonna said:
Liked because it's the only solution I've seen that would actually help indie Devs while simultaneously giving consumers their rights back. Couldn't care about the mainstream devs, but the solo devs pouring their heart into a charming game deserve as much profit as they can potentially get.

I like the sentiment, but not at the cost of consumer rights - those should be de facto enforced. I'm sorry if the profit margins are tight, but nobody said business was going to be easy peasy lemon squeezey. If the product is good, it will sell either way - some people *must* buy the games new for the "pre-owned" copies to exist in the first place. I sympathise and I can get behind solutions that help, but the priority here is the consumer.

Techjunky90 · Sep 20, 2019

tranceology3 said:
Go ahead, enforce these laws. It will be obsolete in 5-10 years when all games are streamed from servers and you never "own" the games Think of it like, can you resell your Netflix movies?

Lmfao! You're an idiot if you think game streaming will ever be anything more than a proof of concept. It's already been proven time and time again that physical games are not going anywhere. The world's internet infrastructure is decades away from being capable of streaming games reliably.

warweeny · Sep 20, 2019

If this goes through i already know how it will be implemented (probably).

It will be like the second hand market, people put up their games with a price-tag, if a purchase is complete, money will be transferred from one steam account to the next (no real money, just steam wallet) and the licence goes with it.
Only caveat they could implement is that steam games that were activated through a steam key cannot be resold since it was not bought on their platform.

I think this would be a great solution because sites like G2A are then quite obsolete. This is pretty much the same idea, but with keys bought from steam, so nobody is selling "stolen creditcard" games.

I am all in for this idea.

DJPlace · Sep 20, 2019

do this for sony systems or GTFO. (i know that sounded rude) but i have so much shit sitting in my Download list it's not funny.

Ev1l0rd · Sep 20, 2019

This is an interesting situation.

Note that for this, I'm purely looking at indie titles, AAA shit sells regardless.

The good:

A death knell for G2A and similar slimy sites.
Forces an answer to the age old issue of not being able to resell digital goods which always seemed weird to me.
You'll be able to buy games for a cheaper price in general second hand.

The bad:

Makes Steam less attractive to developers, we might see developers pull their games from Steam if this goes through. More on that below.
Less revenue for developers if Steam directly offers second hand resale through it's own platform. This could be fixed by making resales through Steam force a cut for the developer?
Causes developers to lose control over the value of their game. Right now, as it is on many online storefronts, the developer essentially holds full control over the price of their products. You'll often find that on second hand slimy sites, the prices for games tend to be exactly those as the "lowest registered" price. This would essentially remove this control.
Will likely cause people to sign up with Epic Games more (YMMV on if this is good or bad, personal preference means I'm gonna put it on bad.)

I doubt Steam is gonna win the higher court call, and the last time this happened (was with refunds), not just Steam, but every major online games store at the time quickly followed through on instating policies surrounding the matter.
So... yeah, let's see where this goes.

Bladexdsl · Sep 20, 2019

odeon said:
Doesn’t take much imagination to figure out a system for resale. Just need an option in steam to convert a game to a key. Then you can sell the key however you like or even give it to a friend. The other party then redeems the key on steam.

and what happens when everyone is just buying the game from users on the marketplace cheap and not from the sellers? the sellers abandon their games and less sellers want their games on steam that's what.

FAST6191 · Sep 20, 2019

Ev1l0rd said:
The bad:

Makes Steam less attractive to developers, we might see developers pull their games from Steam if this goes through. More on that below.

Less revenue for developers if Steam directly offers second hand resale through it's own platform. This could be fixed by making resales through Steam force a cut for the developer?

Causes developers to lose control over the value of their game. Right now, as it is on many online storefronts, the developer essentially holds full control over the price of their products. You'll often find that on second hand slimy sites, the prices for games tend to be exactly those as the "lowest registered" price. This would essentially remove this control.

Will likely cause people to sign up with Epic Games more (YMMV on if this is good or bad, personal preference means I'm gonna put it on bad.)

I doubt Steam is gonna win the higher court call, and the last time this happened (was with refunds), not just Steam, but every major online games store at the time quickly followed through on instating policies surrounding the matter.
So... yeah, let's see where this goes.

Is that a bad thing? Or are you assuming this ruling only applies to Steam? It is a French court so precedent is not as all encompassing as the US but it still forms a basis for a lot of things.
So devs which are artificially getting more now won't? Oh well.
Not seeing the downside. Not to mention the usual workaround is multiple region versions -- not so many peeps in Europe know Russian well enough to play a game in it. If a bit later some kind of saturation is reached then oh whoops a patch dropped.

the_randomizer · Sep 20, 2019

Hope this hurts EGS big time

8BitWonder · Sep 20, 2019

Can't say I feel strongly for or against this.
But it's a neat idea and it will be interesting to see how Valve's appeal plays out.

For folks worried about hacked accounts and libraries being sold;
Steam already places traded/sold items on hold for up to 15 days to prevent people from hacking into and selling entire users' inventory. This way there is time for the user to cancel them and change their credentials.
I doubt Valve would handle it any differently when it comes to selling contents of your library.

Additionally, you can add 2FA to make it even less likely/impossible for someone to break into your account without physically taking your 2FA device and knowing your username/password.

chaoskagami · Sep 20, 2019

Part of me likes this, since it means games will inevitably reach a cost equilibrium over time and make things cheaper for us. The other part of me feels that this is almost worse than piracy for developers and really shouldn't happen.

Arguably, the whole concept of "used" digital games makes no sense, because digital games are always bit-for-bit the same as another copy - and data can be replicated infinitely, unlike a physical product. So were you to buy a "used" copy off someone else, you're getting exactly what the developers sell off the Steam store. Once market saturation of a game is reached, the developers are going to be completely unable to turn a profit and there will be an excess of "free" licenses floating out there, which will drive the price straight into the ground as people try to get rid of copies.

To put it bluntly, I see this crashing the whole game industry and being very bad for Valve.

Ev1l0rd · Sep 20, 2019

FAST6191 said:
Is that a bad thing? Or are you assuming this ruling only applies to Steam? It is a French court so precedent is not as all encompassing as the US but it still forms a basis for a lot of things.
So devs which are artificially getting more now won't? Oh well.
Not seeing the downside. Not to mention the usual workaround is multiple region versions -- not so many peeps in Europe know Russian well enough to play a game in it. If a bit later some kind of saturation is reached then oh whoops a patch dropped.

The refund lawsuits were Australia based, not US.

And it's more from a value perspective. If you buy a physical product second hand, there's a not unlikely possibility that it's used or damaged in some form, which is often why those products are sold at a cheaper price: they've been damaged through use, so it's acceptable to agree that the price is lower.

This obviously doesn't apply to digital games, where each install is downloaded from Steams (or what have you store) CDN.

I'm not saying the ruling applies just to Steam, the last bit is me considering if it could migrate to other storefronts as well (although Epic Games seems much more like the company that would gladly do another lawsuit to not do it if they believe the actual sales earn them more money than the fines do.)

I'm also talking about indie titles, games which often aren't sold for a very high price to begin with (a game that jumps to mind real quickly here is the excellent Pony Island, which is not only sold for 4 bucks but is also just... not replayable at all since it's highly story driven), so multiple languages aren't always an option either due to developers not speaking multiple languages or not having the budget to hire a developer.

Also, keep in mind that this is something that Steam must implement, which would make me guess that they'll end up adding something like a "buy game second hand" button which would region adjust itself to match the game.

Honestly, the most likely side effect of this for AAA games is that we go back to those dumb "insert this one-time use code to play online" things and have Steam email the code to you if it's a first buy and alternatively offer the online code through an in-game market, whilst indies are getting screwed over since they often don't have online components.

DKB · Sep 20, 2019

Cool idea.

XDel · Sep 20, 2019

Would like for this to go International again. I want to sell my entire library.

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