European Courts Rule in Favor of Digital Software Reselling

[biosc1]

Originally Posted by Ondo

It seems to mean the publishers can't prevent the services from facilitating the resale, though, which seems very significant.

But it's not always in your company's best interest to piss of the publishers (ie. Origin vs Steam)

[MagGnome]

Steam is doing just fine. If anyone was hurt by that ordeal, it was EA.

[Shieldmaiden]

If Steam had to allow us to trade games, they could take a massive hit on their sales. Look at the community here; between us, we must own pretty much every game on Steam, probably several times over. If I want to play a given game, it's pretty likely that I'm going to be able to "borrow" someone else's copy for a couple of weeks and then transfer it back to them.

[Pale Ale]

From my cold dead hands!!!!

[RandoM51]

Building this functionality into Steam is non-trivial. Handling player to player $$$ transactions is non-trivial.

Going to be a lot more time in court if you want to force companies to open themselves up to all of those headaches and all of that liability. Just look at the shit raining down on Blizzard because of the RMAH in some countries. In that example they're making plenty of money for doing this. In the case of game resales all they'll do is lose money.

I don't know that attempting to kill the profitability of an industry is actually in the best interests of the consumer.

They keep fiddling with licensing like this and it isn't hard to predict that the game types that make you unlikely to transfer your license in the first place are going to be the only games being made, at least by the large developers/publishers. Get ready for always-online games that require service accounts---service accounts that aren't transferable and that are ultimately more expensive than just buying a copy of a new game is today.

Sure, you can sell/trade your license to use this game but without signing up for our service the game is useless.

The industry is already moving that way, I doubt legislation is going to steal a march on them.

[muddi900]

Actually nowgere does the ruling say that they cannot charge you to facilitate the resale. That's what I would do.

[Widgetcraft]

Originally Posted by RandoM51

Building this functionality into Steam is non-trivial. Handling player to player $$$ transactions is non-trivial.

Both are essentially already there.

[RandoM51]

Originally Posted by Widgetcraft

Both are essentially already there.

No, they're not. The transfer of VIRTUAL goods is there. You can send virtual item with 0 real world value to somebody else. You can send a license to somebody else. No money changes hands.

There is very little legislation specifically governing the transfer of virtual goods, next to none. As soon as you start doing it with currency though you're playing an entirely different game.

The easiest way to explain it is this: As long as money goes into the system but comes out through a single point---Valve in this case---it is easy to track, hard to use for nefarious purposes and since it is a business requirement for Valve they have every incentive to facilitate it. As soon as money that goes in can go out to anybody you have problems. You've just given people the infrastructure to launder money. You've just put the burden on Valve to tie every person in the system to a real world identity, you've just opened them up to liability on each and every one of those transactions.

It isn't a technology hurdle.