Valve Sued In Germany Over Game Ownership 384
An anonymous reader writes "The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZVB) has sued computer game distributor Valve because it prohibits Steam-gamers from reselling their games. Steam users own the games they purchase and should be able to resell them when they want to, just like owners of traditional card or board games can, said Carola Elbrecht, project manager for consumer rights in the digital world at the VZVB, on Thursday. But while those traditional game owners can resell their games whenever they like, Steam users often cannot, she said."
First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
Shame I can't transfer it to another article...
Re:First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
Did you purchase it?
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No, he only licensed it.
Re:First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
Trade-offs (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest drawback, as I see it, is longer term not being able to pass the games on to family/friends to play. Perhaps an option is to have a higher tiered pricing which gives you the ability to resell the game later?
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What? Steam games are almost always overpriced. They get affordable when they go -50% or lower. Its always true for any "non-western" country, but from what I can tell on sites like HotUKDeals ans such - it should be also true for others. Steam is not cheap. I still have around 100 games there, but I wait for bargains, never ever buy at full price.
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Which games are you referring to?
because most of the times i think you can find the retail copy cheaper on sites like amazon than the game is on steam. Of course your local store is more expensive, but that's not the only place you can get the disc-copy retail game from. At least it has been so every time i bothered to look at it. I agree with GP, only the sales are interesting, sometimes.
Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Informative)
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That's Australia. We've established in other articles and discussions that the content cartels gouge the piss out of those down under, and it isn't limited to Steam. It's wrong and should end, but it isn't a fair comparison to make when considering Steam's pricing.
In the US, prices on Steam are unbeatable. There is nothing quite like getting a classic for $5 that you can't find in stores for less than $19.99 (and that's if you can even find it to begin with). I recently got Borderlands 2 for $29.99 - th
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Use a US billing address credit card. Steam will be cheaper than your local store (Far Cry 3 would be $48 now - but who doesn't wait for sales on steam?). You'll have to add ?cc=us to the url. And if lying is outside your moral bounds then it won't be an option since you'll probably have to tell them you are "travelling" (though maybe you don't need to be so specific as to why you are not in the country the card is from, or use a US VPN I guess).
I'm sure there are a bunch of places of varying trustworthynes
Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Insightful)
Steam has great sales - that's usually when I buy most of my games.
A few years back I got Batman: Arkham Asylum with Lego Batman bundled in for $20 - a great steal for myself and my son.
This past holiday sale - I got 12 games, ranging from Trine 2 and Torchlight, to Serious Sam 3 and Arkham City for $65 for everything - that's 12 games for a little over what I just spent on 1 game for the Wii U. And I can access them anywhere... Oh yeah, and a great active gaming community that I have instant visibility to while I'm playing on a proven platform. I don't know how many times I've tried games that come with a "social" component that is more a hindrance rather than something useful. Steam takes care of that problem.
My biggest complaint about steam isn't the fact that I can't resell games - I like my collection in tact. It's the fact that they make it so hard for two people to play. I have a family of 4 - and it becomes a royal pain if my son wants to play Grid racing and I want to play Torchlight. Valve really needs to take a look at introducing a family account. Especially if they are going to start pushing Steam Boxes. What a nightmare it will be to have compartmentalized games for each user that has to be purchased for each individual that wants to play it. Yes, there is offline mode, and yes there are ways around most games for single player mode - but they are band-aides to a much more annoying issue.
Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Informative)
Physical copies of games over here (Poland) are always much cheaper than Steam ones. Especially with Steam's usual $1=E1 prices, the difference is often quite significant and for some reason Steam counts us among the same price region as Netherlands, Germany, e.t.c.
Example: Far Cry 3. E49.99 on Steam, E31 in a shop right next to my flat and you get one extra DLC with it.
Steam gets cheap only during sales.
cya
Raziel-chan
Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Informative)
Not true here in the UK. Steam is often priced 10-15% higher than retail, both via mail-order (the kind that houses it's warehouse in a tax haven and ships small-value packages to avoid paying it in the target country) and, for the big titles, the big-box supermarkets (like Asda) often have a competitive price as well.
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"What? The digital copies of games are usually priced lower than their disc-copy retail counterparts."
Excuse me, no they are not.
My local Game store, Batman AC £12.99, Dishonoured £12.99. On steam they're £19.99 and £29.99. Just two examples
And all the cheap SoldOut label games that are £5 each or three for £10 in-store are £6.99 on steam.
Of course there are exceptions, but not that many.
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Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Insightful)
It honestly wouldn't surprise me if one day the bottles of Heinz Ketchup have a tiny-print on them that states that the product is licensed for home use only.
At present, this is probably not legal, but laws change, and usually to favor big business who can buy lawmakers.
The first sale doctrine is being eroded, and not all that slow either. It's not that long ago that it was self-evident that the buyer could do whatever he wanted with his purchase, and it required a double signed contract to impose clauses. First, the contract became a one-way contract, not signed by the seller. Then the buyer's signature was no longer needed - breaking a seal or clicking a button was enough. Now, licensing has become the standard for digital goods, even delivered in physical form, and you have to hunt with a microscope to find the legalese that tells you that you're not buying anything, just paying.
Scary, indeed. Greed breeds greed.
Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Insightful)
"It honestly wouldn't surprise me if one day the bottles of Heinz Ketchup have a tiny-print on them that states that the product is licensed for home use only."
You mean like the "Not For Individual Sale" labels on most bulk-packaged items?
Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like the "Not For Individual Sale" labels on most bulk-packaged items?
No, that is for a company to avoid labeling each unit individually. I.e. improving profits by cutting costs.
The buyer can still sell the individual packages, he just has to provide the next customer with the mandated labeling.
What I'm talking about is a future where a restaurant (or soup kitchen) can get sued because they served soup licensed for home use only, without paying extra licensing fees.
It's not as far-fetched as you might think - the beer and soda industry already tried it a few years ago, suing a pub that bought bottled beverages cheaper at a local supermarket, arguing that those cheaper bottles were not intended for re-sale. A few more battles, and big business might even start winning. Because the general public can't be arsed to care, as long as it doesn't appear to affect them.
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I have very few games from steam, but the only ones that were inexpensive were those that were over 5 years old. The discount on new games is no where near the price point necessary to be considered "renting". If I pay $40-60 on a game, then I want to be able to lend or give it away to a friend. I did not say resell because too many Steam fans think it's all about Valve vs Gamestop instead of Valve vs customers.
No way can their be a higher tier pricing as you suggest, the prices are already high. Compar
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So am I, on two conditions.
They shouldn't force me to install another client before I can even play the game. I bought a couple of games in a Steam sale and was very unhappy to have to install two new steam competitors just to be able to play. I chose not to, since you then spend half your life waiting for updates to complete, and turning the bloody things off in your systray.
And they should allow me to gift my games to friends when I am finished with them.
Re:Trade-offs (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can't have your cake ... (Score:2, Funny)
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Of course I can. I have done that for years with physical games.
And I can do it with cars, books, DVDs, CD, and basically everything else that is not turning into shit while I use it.
Re:You can't have your cake ... (Score:5, Insightful)
a game is nothing you consume. Its like a book. you read/play it once, then you sell it to the next person for a cheaper price.
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Or perhaps let's go further. Since a book do suffer some degradation over time much more than a digital copy that can be copied and used for years and the information suffers no degradation as long as it is kept redundantly we should declare the whole business of selling digital products by copies completely illegal as an act of fraud. Sure, selling a DVD/BR with pretty prints and box is a different ball game, but not because of the content but the packaging.
This is not about the right of re-selling but the
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Re:You can't have your cake ... (Score:4, Funny)
I sincerely hope that that policy includes a clause about the food in question being undigested.
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Haven't you heard? The cake is a lie.
Being able to transfer games would be awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the days when you bought games individually, you could share them around the household. So if I had bought say, a copy of unreal tournament 3 and call of duty 2, I could play one, and my wife could play the other on her pc (real example! if you prefer, substitute mate or brother for same effect)
Now, with two online game equivalents on my steam account, we can only play one, as both require being online. Even if it came in a box from retail for cash, you often still end up with a steamworks copy. Just giving my wife access to my steam account so we can juggle offline mode between us violates the ToS which theoretically means they can shut down my account and deny access to all my games, or make most of them non playable online with a VAC ban. Same applies for creating a new steam account for each game; not only would that be a giant pain in the ass, but trying to register the same card for multiple accounts risks the lot getting disabled.
They already have the ability to transfer licences between accounts with the gifting system, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to transfer my games to my wife so she can play them when I'm done with them, other than greed.
Re:Being able to transfer games would be awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple answer is boycott products with DRM. Don't give those companies any money otherwise they will think DRM is acceptable.
Re:Being able to transfer games would be awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Being able to transfer games would be awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Suck it up. Seriously, are people today so pathetic that they can't go without playing some games?
Re:Being able to transfer games would be awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Being able to transfer games would be awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Suck it up. Seriously, are people today so pathetic that they can't go without playing some games?
Wait, so as far as you are concern as long as it's not an 'essential' item then it's fine to have to make a choice between complete boycott and giving away long-held consumer rights?
The whole article is about games. Non-essential things. We shouldn't have to choose, art and entertainment is what makes life worth fucking living, it is not something that should be so easily dismissed as a triviality.
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No, his point is that it shouldn't hurt that much if you have to go without certain games because of their DRM-laden nature. He said some games, not all games. Buy stuff from GOG for example and you don't' have this problem. Sure it's not necessarily the latest stuff, but you at least stick to your principles even if it means not playing the latest SimCity for example.
If people are to addicted to games to refuse to buy/play certain titles due to user-hostile actions by the developers/publishers, then honest
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But it's not 'some' anymore, it's most. And it's getting worse. Once GOG run out of past games to trail, what then?
First sale rights did not come about because a mutual agreement between consumer and manufacturer was made, it came about because laws were passed to define what is right. We cannot get to a reasonable balanced state by free market negotiation, we have to have consumer protection laws to keep companies from forever screwing people over.
Re:Being able to transfer games would be awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ok, because 75-80% of today's games are crap anyway.
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That's ok, because 75-80% of today's games are crap anyway.
Too bad they are not the same 75-80%. The games the producers expect to be popular will undoubtedly be the most draconian.
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Only 75-80%? Theodore Sturgeon would like a word with you.
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then you are boycotting pretty much 75-80% of the games released now days. they all have some type of register/online activation system.
That sounds easy enough to do. Let's see, I just turned 45 half a month ago. Assuming I can make it another 45 years, there is a metric buttload of games on a wide variety of platforms (from Amiga or older to Wii, plus the arcade classics on MAME) that I have yet to get caught up on. As long as I have the hardware to run them on, I can easily go the rest of my life without ever purchasing a new game. Heck, now that I'm thinking about it, I am almost tempted to pull the Vectrex out and play a few rounds
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Given a choice between choosing inferior (old and/or low-budget) DRM-free games and becoming Valve's bitch, I choose the inferior games. They're good enough for me.
I bought a couple of games from Steam before I wised up, but I've spent more time begging Valve's tech support to pretty please let me play the games I bought than I have actually playing them.
DRM opponents basically won in the music industry, and if we would stand up with regard to games, we could win there too.
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I could play one, and my wife could play the other on her pc
So Steam has actually improved your marriage?
Even Worse with Physical Media (Score:5, Interesting)
If it was just a download, then I could sort of, kind of see the restriction. But purchasing a physical object, like a book or a DVD or a CD-ROM, should allow one to disassociate the application from one account and sell it on to the next person to associate with their account.
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...which is why I've had to stop buying most games now that so many are using Steamworks. I cancelled my Aliens vs. Predator preorder when I found out, and now I won't be buying Aliens: Colonial Marines. Such a shame...but I refuse to have to ask permission to install software.
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Many games with physical media do not have DRM. They may have copy protection but that is a very different matter as it's not phoning up the mother ship to ask for permission. Fallout 3 does not need a CD (if you bypass the launcher) so there's not even a need for a no-cd crack.
The worst kind of corporatism (Score:5, Insightful)
In the west, Communism is decried in part because it doesn't respect the concept of personal property. None of 'your' stuff is owned by you. So why, given that, should we accept for even one second a culture where we only rent and license things from corporate owners? We can't even be said to own the license since there are so many ways a 'permanent' license can just evaporate.
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Re:The worst kind of corporatism (Score:5, Interesting)
Communism didn't quite work in the material world, but for digital things it's just what the doctor ordered: everyone gives what they can, everyone gets what they want, since there is no scarcity coming from limited nature of natural resources.
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But that's not what's happening. Even when you fork over big bux for a digital thing, you don't end up owning it. It is kept artificially scarce. If you can't give money, you don't get anything. If you can, you still don't get ownership, they just let you use it until they say stop.
Re:The worst kind of corporatism (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, "Communism did not work" argument is a bit of a stretch since the "Communism" did not attempt to be what it claimed to be. State ownership is still private property as far as the communist argument goes, since communism is not simply against the personal ownership of things, but the use of production facilities for non-collective benefit. The state owned factories can be used for appropriate profits only for a small minority, or can be used to fund activities that directly goes against the interest of all workers: like wars.
Communism with capital C, was and is a way where capitalism has been always heading: completely socialized production (i.e. manufacturing at large, employing large crowd of workers in a single economical entity... see the development of factories in the very early capitalism) for the benefit of a small class of individuals and building social hierarchy on the basis of the production. The USSR, China weren't so much incompatible with the market-fundamentalist capitalism of the USA after all, rather a forced modernization from virtually feudal state to wage-work and socialized, industrial production of profit.
Communism with small c, is and was a movement that aimed to destroy the artificially imposed scarcity which capitalism depends on so much. It is quite characteristic that any time technology makes it possible to reduce the resource cost of production, it creates panic, meltdown, and eventually use of force to recover the scarcity (using whatever legal device is available in form of copyrights, patents, non-disclosure enforcement in the area of digital production), or actively promotes new areas of scarcity to recover the losses of profits. The tech industry is the best example how technological development in capitalism is restrained by imposing scarcity, secrecy and lies on the larger population.
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For the life of me, I can not fathom why this "there's no scarcity in the digital world" bullshit is so popular on Slashdot. Of course, there is. There is a scarcity of new content. You can make almost unlimited number of copies of old stuff but for new stuff, you have to invest scarce things (if nothing else, someone's time) and that makes it scarce.
And frankly, I don't think that anyone shouting "there's no scarcity" would be happy if the only source of his gaming would be another copy of Super Mario Bros
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Communism can be voted in and voted out. SOME implementations have been by force, but it's not intrinsic.
More and more, the corporate cancer is spreading to physical goods in the form of IP claims over firmware. Once nobody offers the alternative, it ceases to be a choice.
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
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This totally makes sense. Wish they would also prohibit disabling single player games for violating terms of use. If I don't use a device in accordance with it's manual, a company is in their right to refuse repairing it refuse connecting it to their network. But taking away all games is just ridiculous. Heck, taking an analogy to the world of physical things it's as if company reps came to my home and took, without any compensation, all of the devices made by their company just because I spilled water on m
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Term of usage and EULA's are not contracts. Contracts demand informed consent, which that one can prove within reason that the other person understood what they signed. Contract law demand this because otherwhise, house sellers and job offers could try sneak in "creative" stuff into contract. The "cartoon" way of tricking people with contracts are not legal in the EU, and the law term that enforce this is "Informed consent".
EULA's and Term of usage is more closer to disclaimers than contracts, and is more a
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Germans should read the license before suing. (Score:2)
Re:Germans should read the license before suing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrary to popular belief not all things put on licenses are enforceable and not all rights are possible to give up in exchange of a cheaper deal(essentially this is the whole basis of consumer protection laws).
OTOH.. it's technically possible to sell your steam games. you just have to sell them all at once(sell the account. you can change the realname if you ever put one in..).
Re:Germans should read the license before suing. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but if the law in Germany says otherwise, then it is the law that applies. That's the difference between laws and contracts (of which a license agreement is just a small part) and it's actually impossible to have a contract to break the law; contracts must be lawful or they are simply not contracts by definition. Even if the agreement says that it is not conducted under German law, German consumers will have the right to use German law anyway. (Well, probably; I've not actually checked what the relevant law says, but there's a lot of similarity in this area across different EU members and I know that UK law is very clear on this point.)
The real question is not whether there's recourse in law, but how any ensuing judgements would be enforced. An unenforceable ruling really isn't much use.
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It will probably end with a fine that needs to be paid until they change their terms or stop doing business in Germany (this includes retail games, with mandatory steam). Some publishers might reconsider using steam if this means they loose a lu
Re:Germans should read the license before suing. (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is such a thing as an illegal contract. That's why contracts usually contain a boileplate clause that even if one clause of the contract may be illegal, the rest does still apply. And a TOS isn't even that.
So suing to find out if this can actually be considered legal is an absolutely valid course of action. In fact, it is the only one.
Valve, or the publishers? (Score:3)
People here in Australia often bitch about Valve because of the regionalised pricing of video games - it's not uncommon for some games to cost almost 2x as much as they do in the USA (given the strong value of our dollar).
However, it's not Valve that sets the prices for the games - it's the publisher.
In this case I don't know if Valve are just honoring requirements set by the publishers, or if this just a part of their platform. Either way, I think Steam would be a much tougher sell to publishers if one of the features they provided to gamers was the ability to sell your account at a discounted price to someone else.
(If you want to sell games on Steam, my advice would be to separate out game purchases into different email accounts. Then you can sell the email account and the associated games. I'm sure it's still against T&Cs to do that - and it's a giant pain in the ass - but at least it means you can buy and sell Steam games in discrete chunks.)
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Valve does set some prices, they charge the developer just to use Steam. As I heard it they require the developer to use Steam on all variants of the game; that is if you use Steam with DRM for online distribution (a good idea) then they disallow you from having a physical copy without Steam (bad idea) or from using alternate online distribution means. (some games use Steam to distribute w/o DRM though)
Your idea about multiple accounts is one way. But it would be much easier if Valve just treated custome
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if you use Steam with DRM for online distribution (a good idea) then they disallow you from having a physical copy without Steam (bad idea) or from using alternate online distribution means.
That's not true. Let's pick a semi-recent release, FTL. Development was funded through Kickstarter, and the game is available from three digital distributors. You can get it on Steam, GoG, or direct from the developers.
There is a bigger problem with Steam (Score:5, Insightful)
Not being able to resell a game is nothing compared to the fact that we can lose all our games anytime with Steam. The license agreement say that Steam can change it whenever they want for whatever they want and if we refuse the new license agreement, then the only option is to close the account and lose all the games we "bought". No refund. We own nothing with steam and considering the current license agreement contains clauses which are clearly abusive (they can do whatever they want with whatever information they can gather from their spyware, err... I mean client software), I'd say Steam is one of the most evil company I ever saw.
Perfect Opportunity for Valve (Score:5, Interesting)
This will ensure just about every gamer has Steam. The ability for a gamer to make an impulse purchase is now there. Increase in sales.
Let's face it, if someone is looking for a used copy of a game, their urge to play it probably isn't real high.
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Ultimately, I think the compromise that we will get is that you will be able to resell used games, and you, the distributor, and the publisher will all get a cut. It's unfair for the publisher to get anything -- it doesn't right now, with physical media-only resales -- but you know they will fight and fight to prevent resales at all. The only way they'll ever agree to it is if they get something in return. Unfair though it might be, I don't see any solution that doesn't result in them getting a piece of
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No exchange of money required. If he wants to give me $10 next time I see him, so be it.
Same problem as iTunes. (Score:2)
I'm guessing if this is allowed, you should be able to sell iTunes Music as well.
The main problem I see with this concept isn't that games will get sold, the problem is that they will be given away. Fox example if you had 1000 games, they could be shared between 10000 people, just swapping back af forth whenever needed. It is unlikely that everyone plays this game at the same time, you will create a mentality that allows thinking like "Oh I can buy it somewhere else anyway" and in the end the profits will d
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Just because "everybody does it", doesn't mean it's right. There's a certain price point at which you're effectively paying second-hand prices for a game anyway, so the inability to resell them down the road doesn't bother me - a lot of the GoG back catalog (especially when it's on sale!) fits that bill. But just because it doesn't bother me doesn't mean that I shouldn't have that right. More important, though, is the question of what happens when the company goes under, or decides it doesn't want to suppor
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GOG doesn't take measures to prevent you from selling their games. There's nothing which prevents you from buying some games from GOG, burning them to a disk, and selling someone that disk. The person who you sell it to won't be able to redownload the games from your account, and if you try to redownload them yourself that's piracy, but there's nothing to keep the person you sell the disk to from using the disk to play the game.
Of course, it would be illegal to sell someone that disk and keep a copy for y
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GOG on the other hand has inexpensive games compared to Steam. It also focuses on very old games that the kids don't want to play anyway. They're not paranoid about the resale market like Valve is.
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BS,
In the early 2000s, games (at least all the ones I played) could be installed and played without online activation. Many games did prevent multiple simultaneous uses of the same CD key online which made buying a used copy for online use a little risky but that was about the extent of problems with resale.
Steam was first made available to the public in 2002 but didn't really rise to prominance until 2004 when valve shut down it's WON servers and released half life 2. People bitched and moaned a lot but ul
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Almost never?
I've almost _always_ been able to resell my games. Fallout 3 was late 2008, thats the last big bethesda game i can recall without drm. Aside from the past 5 years of drm bs, I'd say being able to resell is the norm. Though I guess if you're younger you may think it's always been this sucky.
Of course on consoles you are able to resell most games you buy, but that is only because they use a different approach to preventing piracy. In the case of consoles the use digital signature thingy in the console that prevents it running pirated disks without someone modding the console. They can do this by having code in the game that checks the disk in someway and if you remove that code the signature no longer matches to the console will not run the game.
Like it or not the companies who now produce game
Re:inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
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It is an easy problem to fix. Upon transfer the seller's copy is deleted and a fresh copy is provided to the buyer.
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It is an easy problem to fix. Upon transfer the seller's copy is deleted and a fresh copy is provided to the buyer.
That of course is dependant on whether Steam are allowed to do this according to their contract with the people who created / distribute the game in question?
I would not be at all surprised if the who way Steam negotiates the very cheap prices they offer stuff for is that the publishes know the use a very restrictive form of DRM that prevents resale. That DRM may actually be a condition attached by the company who actually own the copyright on the game in question. Since many of the games bought through ste
Re:inevitable (Score:5, Informative)
Rent Buttons (Score:2)
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local laws super seed that contract
It's a crumb! It's a bug! No, its SUPER SEED! Punishing evil-doers with his Embryo of Justice and Sprouts of Righteousness!
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Well that's dead easy to answer. You sell a game or games online, you are already connected to the Internet. "To complete the transaction, click this button to uninstall the software from your machine. The license will then be transferred to the buyer who may then install the software". Not hard, is it? Click or not click, sell or not sell.
As Steam knows every copy of every game and who owns it, I should think that even if you could cheat the system by installing a backup, the next time you were online
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Re:Digital Licenses are not physical media (Score:5, Interesting)
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The software is not being sold. It is being licensed.
Blah. This is a common cry, what happens when everything sold is turned into a licence? You might be technically correct, but more and more of the things we consider "purchased items" are now "licensed services", and long-held rights are being thrown away because of it.
It's an item that you buy once and own forever. It looks like a sale, it smells like a sale... it's a frikking *sale*!
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What if you buy a physical copy that still requires steam to work?
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Re:Always Germany (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody still marvels why we haven't yet gone bankrupt. Quality products and quality service might actually be a good idea. Who knows?
Also note the use of the word "customer". Being called a consumer is a bit
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