Valve forced to allow users to sell games

Beyeas1940

i think this is fair. there are many game stores platforms nowadays and the fact you cant sell one game from steam to friend or to ur second account in epic game store is big minus...

i bought many steam games and they all were awful, only 1 game was interesting. i would love to sell other games, but i cant. great right?

MikeKay1976

You can refund steam games if you have owned for less than 2 weeks and have played for less than 2 hrs so that is something.

Thug

Yeah it certainly helps for newly purchased games, but not for the loads of games I have owned for years that I no longer play (some I have never played).

That's the thing about digital purchases, they can put what ever rules they want, where if you have a physical disc (or a book, music CD, etc) you can do what you want and sell them on or loan them out.
They are not even any cheaper, despite fewer overheads.

MikeKay1976

I pushed back against digital purchases for the longest of times, the problem is, even buying retail it got to the point that a game CD was literally just the digital installer on a disk, so staying physical was no help.

You are right that we are at the mercy of the digital content platforms.  Ask any Nintendo Wii users how they feel about their digital games collection.  (if you are unaware a few months back Nintendo closed their store for the wii, including stopping users downloading the games they had bought.

Nivek TT

Be prepared for more subscription based gaming services!

MikeKay1976

if it goes through i tend to agree.  It is why I kind of hope Valve win their appeal even despite the fact in theory it would be great to sell old games.

hell for instance say i had Fallout 4 and then i wanted to buy fallout 4 GOTY.  I could gift the base game to my mate and still get the GOTY version.  It is pretty clear why developers and valve would not like this however.

Thug

That's one of the reasons why I still buy films.
I probably have about 2 or 3 max digital downloaded films, where is buy 4k (or BD) almost weekly (and sell them again).

GMC79

Not sure if is a good thing or not, say for example you fancy a new game and is 39.99 on steam so as we often do is go check cdkeys and see it is mayb 25.99. Then check marketplace and see it for 22 (as the 2nd hand pricing would have to be based on pricing elsewhere like cdkeys)
Nobody would ever buy direct from store again.. (although people would have to buy initially) unless to have refund opportunity, which may well end up disappearing if that was the case.

I'd say leave it as is, cant see it being good and can't see it happening.tbh.

Jamezinho

Sounds good at first but the implications for the industry will be mostly negative. The move to digital distribution was, in part, to hit the used games market and generate more 'new' sales for software companies. As others have said, the natural evolution from being able to sell 'used' downloads will be the games-as-a-service subscription model.

Always worth remembering that a digital download isn't so much a product that we own but a licence we pay for. We technically never own these downloads therefore I don't see how we have the right to sell them on.

Careful what you wish for.

MartinH32

Yes, I hate the fact that anything digital can just be taken away from me - when I've purchased the rights to use it!