I have two questions.<p>First, if the product is unopened, how will Bethesda know the warranty does not apply? I have bought a number of products that came with a registration card that I was supposed to send in so I could get the warranty. In the case of PC games, I'd assume the warranty kicks in if you tie the game to your steam account. No idea how this works for consoles. But this has clearly not happened yet.<p>Second question: What warranty? Are you f'ing kidding me? Bethesda has been shipping horrendously buggy games for as long as anyone can remember. You buy them at your own peril. After a few years of patches from Bethesda and the community (google for unofficial skyrim patch) the games become playable. But it's not like you get the patches on warranty after complaining to Bethesda. You get them automatically. Because otherwise nobody would buy those games in the first place. If there is a warranty from Bethesda, I would be very interesting in finding out its terms.<p>As far as I know, nobody has ever gotten their money back from Bethesda because the game was too buggy. Bug people have gotten their money back from Steam when returning a buggy game. So Steam actually does offer a warranty that is actually worth something.<p>It is worth noting that Steam had to be guilt-tripped into offering that warranty by too many shitty, buggy or outright fraudulently marketed games. This was not a day one feature.
Isn’t this trivially mooted by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So...</a>. ?<p><i>The Court held that the first sale doctrine applies to goods manufactured outside of the United States, and the protections and exceptions offered by the Copyright Act to works "lawfully made under this title" is not limited by geography. Rather, it applies to all copies legally made anywhere, not just in the United States, in accordance with U.S. copyright law. So, wherever a copy of a book is first made and sold, it can be resold in the U.S. without permission from the publisher.</i>
Archive link if needed: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180812140408/https://www.meganwalker.me.uk/2018/08/questions-on-the-bethesda-reselling-drama/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20180812140408/https://www.megan...</a><p>(My website may not survive the HN hug of death).<p>—-<p>I made this because I feel there’s some interesting questions and implications this raises specifically because it’s going after unauthorised sellers who market their goods as new.<p>I specifically did not try to answer all the questions I’ve raised because for most of them I don’t have a definitive answer, or possibly even what it should be. I’m interested to see discussion on these points though!
This may be related to Bethesda transitioning to distributing its PC games directly via Bethesda.net and cutting out middlemen such as Steam. They want to capture the full price of a retail copy, and to do that they are cutting out resellers on all platforms to drive people towards their own new platform.<p><a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-wont-launch-on-steam/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-wont-launch-on-steam/</a>