Valve is convicted in France for banning the resale of dematerialized games

Started by Legend, Sep 19, 2019, 08:36 PM

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Legend

Sep 19, 2019, 08:43 PM Last Edit: Sep 19, 2019, 09:29 PM by Legend
This seems like a really really bad ruling. Hopefully however this can be a good thing in the long run and lead to laws and regulations that achieve the same consumer protections without crashing the industry.

Fundamentally I think we need to accept that digital content is not physical content and it's impossible to have both single purchase games and reselling.


Imagine a website that for just 1 dollar a month, it lets you play every PC game ever released whenever you want. The website has legal licenses for games and sells you a license for $60 every time you click the play button. When you close the game, it auto sells the game back to them for $60. To the player this happens behind the scenes and doesn't impact them just like similar temp charges on cards.

The service would only need to worry about concurrent players instead of lifetime players. It fundamentally breaks the concept of traditional game ownership and a service like this is inevitable if game reselling is treated like physical reselling.


A market like this might sound good and might be fine if every part of the industry adjusted to it, but it shows the futility in attempting to keep digital goods sold like physical goods.