I can't imagine Valve won't find some loophole or way around this. Being able to resell digital games would destroy that economy. A possible outcome would be games in France are never on sale and they can only be traded within the French Steam economy. Can Valve still take a cut of all sales on their platform or add fees? Very curious how this turns out, but I feel like it's 50/50 whether this makes things better or worse.
From the article: "Valve’s defence hinged on the argument that Steam sells game licenses – subscriptions – to games, not the games themselves. The court, however, doesn’t see game purchases on Steam as subscriptions, since the owner has access to them indefinitely, and isn’t required to pay recurring payments in order to maintain access."
Guess what the loophole's gonna be?
Steam will cost you 1 euro a month to maintain access, BUT WAIT, we've got this awesome "temporary introductory" deal where for every Euro you spend on anything in our store, anything at all, you get one free month of subscription! Yes, buy one brand new AAA game and you get 5 or 6 years of free subscription! Wowzers! What a stonking great deal for the consumer! Such an incredible deal that has been so successful that we're running it indefinitely, despite the fact it's totally temporary.
But if you do somehow manage to run out of months, you will indeed lose access. That part has to be real. And there will be a real "just buy subscription access" option, though nobody will ever use it because why just give Valve 12 Euro when you can buy a game with it instead?
I'm fairly confident in common law traditions, that would be too blatant and they couldn't literally do that. They'd sidle up in that direction, though, as close as they thought they could get. I don't know about how France's Civil Law tradition would take that, but, still, same principle; head in that direction as close as you think you can get. "As close as you can get" may in fact be quite far, but I think this is still the general direction you're going to see.
> Valve’s defence hinged on the argument that Steam sells game licenses – subscriptions – to games, not the games themselves.
IANAL but buying a license seems different to me than buying a subscription, and if you ask most Steam users they will tell you that they do the former not the latter. (In fact I have never seen the word subscription on their store, though I guess it is somewhere in their EULA).
If they go that way they may have to change their wording and that will also change the perception that people have of the platform: if I'm subscribing to a service the price I'm willing to pay to access (not buy) the games will probably much lower.
It may be better for them to just keep people thinking that the own the games forever (even though we know in practice this is probably not be true).
I'm wondering if instead they could just set themselves as the middleman for the used game market, since they already have all the infrastructure needed. In this way at least both steam and the publisher could get a cut.
I agree, the court's argument doesn't make much sense. It can only result in various work arounds, for example making everything subscription based which most customers don't really want.
Another work around could be selling per computer license -you will have to pay for using it on every new computer. It's not something anyone wants.
Game sales over time generally resemble a power distribution. Most sales happen within the first week or so, then sales follow a steep drop-off. There are of course exceptions in the indie game community, but AAA publishes build up to a tidal wave of marketing for release day, then things kind of simmer down.
So a second hand market would cut into the tail-profits. Certainly not desirable for studios, still but quite a few jaunts away destroying the economy.
It's a toss up whether I want money going to the dev or publisher rather than someone selling their game. With the way that prices drop drastically, sometimes not even a few months after, I'm fine with the current model. The only thing I'd really want changed is a more permanent way of keeping games like GOG.
They could put a fee on it, just like they do for cards and in-game items, then share with the publishers/developers.
Sell a game for $10, you take $9, valve take $0.50 and gives $0.50 to the publishers.
I see this working well for games that are no longer available to buy on the "new games" store. For example, the Deadpool game, It's no longer for sale, but I have a copy the I son't play anymore. I could sell it for a few bucks for someone who wants it.
