French court rules Steam games must be able to be resold

Valve&#x27;s defense in this case was puzzling. It appears that they tried to argue that Steam is a subscription service (which are exempt from secondary sales), which was just obviously bullshit. From a bit of reading, it seems like there would have been at least two much stronger defenses available. First, the way the 2012 CJEU decision was actually interpreted in practice by other lower courts incredibly strictly[0], requiring outrageous levels of proof that the secondary seller no longer had access to the sold software.<p>And then separate from that, the core of the 2012 court decision was the 2009 &quot;legal protection of computer programs&quot; directive. But in 2014 (in the Nintendo vs. PC Box case) the CJEU basically ended up ruling that games did not fall under that directive due to how heavy they are on non-software (audio-visual) content[1].<p>I&#x27;d be really curious why Valve&#x27;s lawyers ignored these avenues and went for the ridiculous subscription option. (And equally, I&#x27;m curious about why France was going after Valve when PSN, Xbox Live, Apple App Store and Nintendo eShop appear to be softer targets).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gameslaw.org&#x2F;the-end-of-the-usedsoft-case-and-its-implications-for-used-software-licences&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gameslaw.org&#x2F;the-end-of-the-usedsoft-case-and-its-im...</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;curia.europa.eu&#x2F;juris&#x2F;document&#x2F;document.jsf?docid=146686&amp;doclang=en" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;curia.europa.eu&#x2F;juris&#x2F;document&#x2F;document.jsf?docid=146...</a>

&gt;For Valve, it would only apply to tangible games, not to online licenses. According to the UFC, the initial purchaser must be able to resell these games second-hand, even those acquired on the platform.<p>Sounds like physical games that must be activated on Steam to be able to be played. Once you activate them you can&#x27;t play on another account even if you have the DVD (but sometimes it&#x27;s just a code in the case). That&#x27;s an opposite of most physical console games that can be resold and played on other consoles, under other accounts.<p>For example I have The Evil Within phsyical collector&#x27;s edition (awesome game btw) and it comes with a Steam code. I can&#x27;t play the game under other Steam accounts. And the physical DVDs are worthless, I can&#x27;t resold them. On the other hand if I would have bought the game on PS4 or XBox One I could just give the disks to someone else and they can play the game no problem.

If this ruling holds, my expectation is simply that games will sell at higher prices, or keep their original prices instead of having frequent Steam sales with deep 70-80% discounts. That would keep the after-market price higher as well, and then sellers could have more modest sales that just seek to undercut the secondary market for a few days. I also think people would be more willing to purchase at higher prices if resale were possible: I used to buy a lot more games at full $60 price when it was all physical and I resold most games a month later for 60-70% of the purchase price. I&#x27;d experiment a lot more with games I wasn&#x27;t sure of. Now I only pay that much for games I know I&#x27;ll like, and otherwise wait for the inevitable deep sales.<p>I would also not be surprised is Steam sets things up so that they collect a sizable transaction fee like the iOS app store for such transactions, and that publishers demand a cut of those proceeds as well in order to publish on the platform. In fact it would be forward-thinking of Steam to initiate that on their own. Finding a way that everyone gets what they want may be the best way forward here.

Valve could avoid most of this trouble if &quot;sharing your library&quot; actually worked on the level of individual games and wasn&#x27;t functionally identical to just giving someone your password for the entire account.<p>It is ridiculous that my partner and I can&#x27;t play different games which I have bought at the same time via Steam.<p>I&#x27;m all for Valve getting a fire lit under their ass for this.

Digital assets can be duplicated for free, but can&#x27;t be created for free. That holds a conflict, which we&#x27;ve not been good at solving. So far, it&#x27;s been phrased as: do we forbid digital asset duplication or do we make the creators carry the cost? There&#x27;s no win-win from this viewpoint. Which is the lesser evil: architectural technology castration or economic punishment of creators?<p>I&#x27;m confident that neither of those is a sustainable solution, and a more fundamental rethink is needed. Currently I&#x27;m interested in alternative ways of compensating the creators.

This sounds very bad for single player story based games. Which are my favorite type of games to play.<p>Digital games would be very easy to resell and a game can be easily bought once and resold tens&#x2F;hundreds of times.<p>Plus any kind of discount would probably mean that you devalued your game forever.

Note that this is from September. Not sure if anything interesting has happened with the case since then.

This legal ruling also sets a precedent for digital purchases and resale of xbox one and PS4 games in France.

Soon: all games are purely SaaS and require subscription to play. Want to play this game on another account? Buy new subscription!

I&#x27;ve always wanted to re-sell my Steam games. I assume Valve has a real business reason why they haven&#x27;t allowed this, since when sharing your games locally they are better than anyone. Clearly they don&#x27;t have the big company mindset of forcing people to pay for a license on every device.<p>If Valve complies with this ruling I&#x27;d guess we&#x27;ll find out what that reason is. I think loot crates and the item market reveals the problem. Steam licenses will turn into some kind of black market money laundering machine that will be impossible to regulate.

I would love to see video game licenses as ERC-721 tokens that you buy and can use and move between the different digital game platforms out there. If you own the token in your wallet then the DRM or whatever system lets you play the game. If you don&#x27;t own the token then no game unless you pirate it like today.<p>This would allow games to be purchased at many different competing stores (like you can with physical boxed games today) and also allow selling games on any market out there (again, like boxed games and ebay). It keeps all of the upsides of boxed games but since it is digital has all of the convenience of digital downloaded games.<p>This concept extends to all media like music, movies, etc but games seems like a great first use case. I hope someone at Valve pitches this idea.

I think this is bad; not necessarily for the consumer, but for the industry as a whole. Reselling means that copies sold after the release benefit random consumers, not the developer. On the other hand unresellable licenses along with sales mean that everyone pays the same price, but the developer gets all of the revenue. Digital goods cannot be scarce; we shouldn&#x27;t treat them as if they are.

Since they are treating virtual products as physical products same thing goes for non-consumable virtual products for apps on apple devices which includes app sale or in-app non-consumable. Maybe apple could provide this in the future to all users with generated codes for each non-consumable transaction for trade purposes.

Why don&#x27;t they sell games as a subscription without upfront costs? That would solve the problem for everyone.

French court is one of the dumbest in the world. That&#x27;s a completely stupid idea : A video game is sold to only one person, if it is resold, it means that the initial selling price must cover the usage for an infinite number of users ? That is nonsense.

Steam should pull out of the French market.

This would also apply to all other digital stores like Origin and what happens with consumables?

I think this should apply to all software one buys that can and does run solely on one&#x27;s hardware. The idea that only a license to the software can be sold is frankly absurd and in a world of SaaS, unnecessary and destructive. It&#x27;s amazing what kind of illogical craziness our courts of law can justify in the name of profit.

How do we get this case brought against Valve (and all the others) in the US?

As an european, I really like how the EU is progressively standing up to the US on many aspects.<p>I know it&#x27;s very subjective, but beyond the islamic anti-americanism, there are other more moderate, valid views that the US is often abusing its power. It applies to monopolies, uber, airbnb, GAFAs, tax avoidance, and many other things.<p>California has its own GDPR equivalent.

Half Life : Alyx, coming soon to everyone, except France.

This is great. Anything that may only be &quot;owned&quot; by one person at a time should categorically be able to be resold. Licenses too. If you&#x27;re a proponent for capitalism (which I guess all publisher decision-makers are), then let the market work. The profit motive will solve all problems.

I love this. We are so desperately in need of digital consumer protection laws, like mandatory labeling for the minimum length of time server-dependent products like home automation or games will be supported by the manufacturer.

Reselling games on Steam seems so silly to me. Many of my games cost less than $1 because I bought them in bulk during the big seasonal sales. What am I going to resell them for 50 cents? Too much effort!<p>Maybe it makes more sense to resell those $80 AAA games, but I get the feeling those who are thrifty enough to want to resell games all the time are probably fine with waiting until they go on sale anyway.