Incline of EU: You can re-sell your digitally bought games

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DRM

Sometimes I wish I could “trade in” rare purchases I regret... but people are so eager to throw money in a wrong direction just to save few bucks.
If some kind of “digital gamestop” somehow became possible and succeeds, any inevitable countermeasure would be change for worse.
It would be even more all about marketing/hype and moving copies in the first month ( week ? ). This, or subscription services.

It's to make sure you can't sell your game multiple times or still own it after selling it. Only fair.

It's a moronic attempt to introduce artificial scarcity that will backfire immensely.

Good luck with your DRM enabled computers suckers

How is having your game removed from the game list in steam gonna backfire? Maybe in other services but definitely not steam.

This is a general directive. General directives are supported by general solutions - anyone that wants to sell software in Europe is going to be scrambling to use hardware DRM since that is the only way to sell in stores and obey the 'customers can resell but not keep a copy' when the actual software is not on a digital service with a server.

Photoshop on steam?

Think of hardware DRM like they want to prevent the 'copy' primitive but want to allow the 'move' primitive.
A really fancy hardware DRM would allow you to 'move' your product to another hardware DRM without a server, just by checking (from it's public keys) that it is actually genuine without a arbitrating server.

I see, here's a brofist for your trouble.

TELL ME HOW!

It's trivially easy to run steam games without steam. Half of them you don't even need to do anything actually.

The majority of steam games that force you to run steam do so in basically the same way. There is a generic program that can take them and make it standalone.

Actually now that i read with more attention, this only applies for digital products so they are expecting a (lol, more like thousands) 'forever' server to hold the mappings of owner-product - problematic by itself. Still, it will encourage the 'final solution'.

And if you think about it - who is going to have to hold these mappings? The company that sold the product originally? Yeah, they're going to be looking at those € flying around and not going to do anything about it, that's logical. Currently steam associates your account with all your games to discourage account selling, they may have to introduce a feature to allow 'movement' of single games to other accounts. Which means they will know which accounts are reselling.

DING DONG BANNU

i agree with SCO. This may seem great in principle, but we're not talking about physical copies. The digital service provider is not earning any money from this transaction. I accept refund in principle, but reselling digital copy is like asking a game store to foot the delivery bill to the guy you're reselling to (bandwidth remember?)

Just implement a 14 day refund policy for digital copies and I'm happy enough already.

Not that this is what publishers want but they could just continue selling keys/passwords like they already do for 20 years anyway.

This law was basically established in Germany since the upcoming of software. You were always allowed to make copies of your bought game for safety reasons and when selling the game you had to format the disks (or sell them with the original game). The EU just shares this opinion now officially and makes clear that this rule counts for every game you buy, digital or physical.

I like it. Finally a legal decision which supports the consumer rights being eroded by publishers.

To be honest I never really liked or supported the move to digital-only products. Of course it is more convenient, of course it gets away from all of the potential troubles associated with having a game on a physical disc but there are many things (including this entire debate) that have become new problems to be dealt with, which I think pulls it back below the offerings of the old physical sale system.

Games should absolutely be a product, just like books and movies whatever else, even in digital form. There is almost nothing positive that can come out of games becoming a service.

Some things to think about.

Digital providers will now need to introduce new mechanisms to allow people to transfer games. In doing this they will encourage things to stay "above the table" giving them control over the transaction and the product. Someone like Steam will have a vested interest in this as facilitating a sale between accounts still maintains (or potentially increases) their customer base, even if it means forfeiting a full sale. Given that the steam platform is a service, they will possibly start introducing service costs to transferring games or possibly incentives to either buying games new, or simply not reselling the games that you have. Both are viable options.

Additionally, these digital platforms will most likely introduce a system of tracking the resale of games. They will start to label when a game has been transferred, and they may introduce a system whereby the player loses access to certain things when that resale occurs so that there is still incentives in buying games "new", a similar strategy to the way they now have DLC and other things available only to those who buy a game new. Perhaps they will make new purchases even more attractive through grouped discounts or introduce a system of credits that determines rates of discounts based on the number of purchases (added credits) and the number of resales (subtracted credits). I don't purchase on steam so I don't really know a lot about their current system of promotions.

As long as they can control the majority of the population participating in this resale process, it should have little effect on developers anyway, but it is time we solidified the consumer rights and then expected developers and publishers to work around that in a non-negotiable way

If they can prevent used games from using certain features then they will prevent used games from playing at all.

No, I'm not talking about the main game they're paying for. I'm talking about the extra "free" content that they can download that doesn't come a part of the main purchase. Developers won't be allowed to restrict the playing of used games outright because of this ruling, they can only focus on associated benefits that don't fall under the purchase. People can't sell or get refunds for things they didn't technically buy.

So publishers will say that buying the game only lets you play the tutorial, and the rest of the game is "free" extra content. You're trying to draw an arbitrary line between what is "bought" and what the player is actually able play with their game, publishers will walk all over that line.

Look, I don't buy DLC, I never have, and I don't support these tiny transactions of pointless content that are so popular these days. Many gamers love this stuff though. They are affected by it. They will respond to it as an incentive.

A publisher can make such a devious move as that, but I don't think you understand where my point is at. I didn't make the idea up, the stuff already exists. We are talking about the same game that goes on the DVD. The same game that gets submitted to the ESRB for rating, the game that reviewers receive to give impressions on the game. Are you suggesting they sell a DVD with a tutorial on it? How naive do you think people are?

And what happens when 99% of the game is on the DVD and you have to connect to the publisher's DRM network to download the 1% that actually makes it work? You're right, this stuff already exists and publishers are already abusing it.

Obviously I'm not talking about things which are essential to the game. If it was essential then a court would most likely rule it as being a part of the purchase and therefore illegal to disallow people with resold copies from accessing it.

You should always be happy about decisions that favour consumers. The more that are made, the more difficult it becomes for publishers to find ways to take advantage of people. What I really want to see is a court or government body actually penalising a company for failing to provide refunds to customers that were entitled to them. Precedents are very powerful motivators

Because you are going to go to court for every game to determine what is "essential"? No, so publishers will rape their customers.

I never said I wasn't happy about this decision. I'm unhappy about your assertion that anything downloaded by the game is somehow different from the game itself and can't be sold, because that's fucking stupid.

The sooner we get another one of these the better. With all the big publishers in their death throes, indie developers will fill the void and a new golden age of gaming can begin.

Yeah people who actually make games, no matter how shitty getting replaced with moronic hipsters who can only make brainfarts about squares jumping around circles with 2deep4you narration will surely make "golden age" begin.

Shouldn't you be working in the mines so you can afford a new PC to run ArmA 3 at 10 fps?

The derp is strong in this one.

Cant wait for Gabe and his corporate friends to sponsor a new "law" to fix this, since democracy and rights have no place on this planet. Where is that brainwashed gabe whore, i didnt saw him on this thread.

I have like 50 shity games to sell from my steam accounts thats like 80% of the inventory...Want to sell your blizzard games, or nc soft? hahaha, sell your full account...

FU TRIPLE AAA Devs, FU TRIPLE AAA Consumers