- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
Finally some good news! I’ve been waiting for quite a while for such a ruling.
Edit: Seems this cites an article from 2012, I didn’t notice that (and it’s still news to me). Though there’s still hope that it’ll happen, EU is slow, but usually eventually gets shit done.
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This article is based on an article from Eurogamer in 2012 [1].
There’re more recent similar rulings like in France in 2019 [2], but Valve already appealed. It will take many years until there’s a final decision.
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/eu-rules-publishers-cannot-stop-you-reselling-your-downloaded-games
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/valve-steam-resell-games-ban-france-eu,40438.html
This is an 11 year old article, so hardly “news”
Published 10:20, 04 December 2023 GMT
???
Click through to the real article, not the reblog
News by Wesley Yin-Poole Contributor
Updated on 3 Jul 2012
Interesting! I wonder how/if platforms will implement this, maybe my backlog will finally make me some money 😆
Right??? There’s lots of games I own that I played through once or twice and will probably never play again. I was hoping something like this would come along someday.
Please Valve, be the first to implement a market for the players on Steam, and once again you’ll be the pioneer that everyone tries to copy.
They literally just need to add a way to “repackage” a game from your library into an inventory item and then they could use the Marketplace they already have
It would be cool but they probably wouldn’t pay money directly to your bank on sale. It would still be locked to Steam. Wish valve let you transfer money out.
Greenmangaming was doing this a decade ago. Steam wouldn’t be the first,but it might be the one to get it to stick.
(Ironically, it was predominantly steam games at first that couldn’t be traded on GMG)
WELL, good thing for Steam and others they sell “perpetual limited licenses” of games instead of “digital copies”.
The EU doesn’t mess around, their definition of digital purchase is what matters, not the wording in steam EULA
Yeah consumer retail has implied contracts that override anything you write in a TOS or EULA. You can add certain things with those but there’s still a basic commercial transaction happening that is bound to the rule of law.
I’m mentioning this because I remember EU going after Valve sometime in 00’ or early 10’ because of this, and remember Valve basically saying “well, we will no longer sell digital goods then, enjoy your licenses”. I know I remember this but I cannot find a source on google…
Need someone who knows more about EU law to chime in here: does this mean valve et al will be forced to implement a way for users to resell/transfer games to other users?
As others have pointed out, the original article is from 2012, and even with similar rulings in EU countries more recently, it will take years before we see any result of this.
But I think the ultimate answer to your question here is: yes, that would become a thing.
But there is so much to this that makes it hard to predict how good it would be. Who decides the price? What rules will there be on when and how you can resell?
NFT game licences turn digital game sales into used game trading like you’d find at gamestop - except still being equivalent/identical to brand new purchases
Yep tradable licenses is about the only thing NFTs are actually good for.
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NFT is a non-fungible-token. That’s all that’s required for a game licence. What part of that is unnecessary? Are you looking at existing media based NFTs and applying those systems verbatim?
I imagine the unnecessary part is the whole being built on an unwieldy and expensive third party platform when it would be far easier to just use these platforms existing customer database. All major digital platforms keep track of customer accounts anyway so you can download the game more than once, so it’s not like it would be hard to implement a in house transfer system that doesn’t require an irrelevant middleman.
a in house transfer system
See and that’s the issue if you want to sell your game you shouldn’t need to do it on steam, it should be a system that continues to exist even if the producer (gamedev) and store go bankrupt, you want some kind of public ledger.
Yes, but crypto keys recorded with an owner in a public ledger, so there’s a clear single owner.
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Not really, though. NFTs only benefit is to distribute trust/authority. In this case there still needs to be some central authority who will actually honor it and provide the game at the end (either Steam or the game’s creator or something else). It is far more energy efficient for that central authority to also track who has what without performing useless work.
Steam or the creator shouldn’t be a central authority: If you have a game on steam and want to sell it to someone and they then activate in on epic, that should be possible. There should be zero influence from those parties over what happens with the NFT. It would also be legal, at least over here, to procure an erm backup copy from somewhere if you have such an NFT. And the NFT can live on after the original minter (presumably the publisher) went out of business. Say, GOG or archive.org could offer a service where the gamer pays a small fee and they can download binaries+emulation environment for those abandoned NFTs.
Neither the publisher nor the original store have any legal standing preventing any of this because exhaustion. Which is also why you can get Windows keys for dirt-cheap in e.g. Germany: There’s a small cottage industry buying up volume licenses at bankruptcy proceedings and then sell them on, unbundled. Microsoft can do exactly as much about it as Coca-Cola can stop you from selling individual cans from a sixpack.
That’s an interesting idea to me, particularly regarding preservation of games of bankrupted companies. I’d still be in favor of a central registrar as opposed to NFTs, just because of the huge inefficiencies and environmental impact of that (essentially useless) computation.
There would need to be some governing authority dictating that companies need to honor the download of games not purchased from them (essentially the government of each country that has this as a law). It would make sense to me that that same government could host a service to keep track of the transactions. Or, more likely, the government just mandates the companies to play nice and exchange purchase data with each other. Sure, in some sense you’re letting the wolves run the henhouse, but it also isn’t that different from a game company refusing to give you a game you purchased from them. They could do that, but you would take legal action against them. Same thing here.
I don’t mind tradable game items too, it would be cool if valve didn’t have a monopoly on community trading. They could still even take an automated royalty cut with NFT trades
Problem there is the gas cost of blockchain is too high. Recording transactions on chain is expensive. It might be worthwhile for full game transfers, but for cosmetics? I doubt that.
You could also achieve exactly the same benefits without adding in the expense of gas fees at all. Indeed that gives you quite a few other benefits like being able to reverse fraudulent transactions and being able to ensure the platform gets a cut.
Why should steam get a cut if I sell a game.
What blockchain? There are many implementations, there’s no reason there has to be excessive “gas” costs. These are solved problems
What blockchain doesn’t have high transaction costs once it scales up to large usage? Fundamentally blockchains are about hyper-redundant indestructable storage with expensive costs for writing to that storage to prevent flooding it with garbage. The most mature and sophisticated blockchain that doesn’t involve burning down a forest to solve sudokus is the Ethereum network, which is probably the one to point to when we’re talking about a large blockchain, and that’s one that uses the subcurrency of “gas” to model paying for recording into that ledger.
Are there any blockchains that could handle transaction volumes on the scale of a game-store like Gog or Epic (much less Steam) without putting non-trivial prices on writing the transactions to the ledger?
Why bother with NFTs? every storefront already has a licensing system, the only benefit I could see is being able to move it from storefront to storefront, but they will never go for that. Even then it could be done much more efficiently other ways.
Direct trading of games between individuals. Not locked into one market that could shut down. EA and Steam sell the same game. EA wouldn’t let valve have a monopoly on used game trades
Wouldn’t surprise me if, assuming this actually comes to fruition, certain game stores such as epic or any of the non-Steam/GoG stores end up implementing the selling of your digital games in the most absolute abhorrent ways imaginable. Things like making the service to sell your games on their shops run at a snails pace, being forced into a profit cut because you use their service, or just flat out editing your account to make you break ToS and then deleting your account.
A) Article isn’t available
B) Before the garbage article was taken down, all it did was source an eurogamer article from 2012 when the law changes first where made
C) y’all wasting your time
Locked credits to steam and they take a big cut.
Better than nothing I suppose…
Fine by me.
Please enforce this for console games as well. Digical games and DLCs are typically more expensive than both new and used physical games. Physical games prices usually decrease few months after release, digital one rarely do.
It’s obvious that vendors rely on digital restriction (aka DRMs) to kill the used market and sell older games at higher price. I’m avoiding digital games and DLC because of this, and I’m reluctant to buy a new console given the hard push toward digital games and attempts to kill the used market.
If this really happens I’d get to “clean” my steam library
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This is pretty stupid considering digital Goods have no physical presence, no scarcity,
