This is absurd. When I buy a game on Steam, I fully understand that it doesn't have any resale value – and I easily agree to this deal, because I choose to forgo resale rights so I can get the game cheaper. But now this court have effectively destroyed my freedom to make this choice as a customer. And to add insult to injury, it's done this under the pretense of defending my rights, as if I'm an idiot who's not capable of making an informed choice.
I really hope Valve finds a way to fight this. I don't want to go back to pre-Steam PC game prices.
>But now this court have effectively destroyed my freedom to make this choice as a customer
To frame the idea that you don't have ownership of something you purchase as a freedom is some truly Orwellian spin on the term. You still have all the freedoms you had before, if you don't want to sell your games don't sell them.
Giving customers proper ownership rights over the goods they purchase is not freedom diminishing, what has the world come to where you frame giving up control or ownership as freedom?
> GP currently has the ability to buy a product in a way they like (not purchasing resale rights that they don't want.)
Why is GP's freedom more important than my freedom to buy the product in the way I like (purchasing resale rights, or even having them included by default)? On top of that, the fact that GP has the "freedom" now doesn't mean that having the freedom is an inherent good. Remember that slave owners previously had the freedom to own slaves, and now they don't. Taking away a freedom somebody once had is arguably the foundation of civil society and the state if you subscribe to the idea that humans without the state exist in a state of anarchy.
>You're calling their view Orwellian because French Big Brother knows what ownership rights they really want to purchase?
No, the Orwellian view is that there is freedom in companies being able to decide what you can do with something after you've bought it from them. The person you're replying to, in my reading, views the whole notion of such a freedom as being profoundly anti-freedom. This is the sense in which it's Orwellian - freedom is confused, at large, with its opposite. As such, the way you're using the term "freedom to do business the way they like" is itself an expression of that unfreedom, just as in 1984 the usage of the word "freedom" by the Party actually refers to its opposite. From Marcuse:
>Thus, the fact that the prevailing mode of freedom is servitude, and that the prevailing mode of equality is superimposed inequality is barred from expression by the closed definition of these concepts in terms of the powers which shape the respective universe of discourse. The result is the familiar Orwellian language ("peace is war" and "war is peace," etc.), which is by no means that of terroristic totalitarianism only. Nor is it any less Orwellian if the contradiction is not made explicit in the sentence but is enclosed in the noun.
Really it's the seller's freedom that matters first. It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms. The buyer has the freedom to buy or not buy the product. In this view intellectual property law is only enforcing the terms of the voluntary contract.
On Orwell. I was commenting that I could accuse the accuser of Orwellianism of Orwellianism. But I could do it with the advantage that their version includes using the machinery of the state to call a restriction of a freedom a freedom.
I don't think it's productive to argue over who's really Mr(s). 1984. Instead we can accept that we're talking about trade-offs in freedoms, that it will be complicated, and go from there.
> It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms.
No they can't, and there's precedent for that: food regulations, warranty regulations, refund regulations, regulations on sale to minors, tax regulations etc. - this is in recognition of the fact that without the resources provided by the state and civil society, they wouldn't be able to sell it (or, in some cases, even produce it) in the first place.
> But I could do it with the advantage that their version includes using the machinery of the state to call a restriction of a freedom a freedom.
This is rather ironic, not only because restriction of freedom is what gives us what we regard as higher freedom (almost by definition, e.g. the case of the savage society being less free than ours since there are no laws against murder and theft, thus people cannot pursue their "higher" ends freely) but also because Orwell was himself a socialist![0]
Restrictions on freedom are not merely trade-offs, they are essential to the functioning of society. The point I'm making is that this restriction on the freedom of the seller in this case is based on a conception of freedom in which its opposite (unfreedom) is held within the noun itself. When you speak of the freedom of the seller, you're also speaking of the unfreedom of everyone else.
[0] "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." (George Orwell, 1946, "Why I Write")
We're getting pretty far off-track which is what I was trying to avoid but ok, I'll try to bring it back around.
I believe a human being has a fundamental right to their own labor, and even if this isn't the case I think we do best acting as if it is. Socialists of all stripes disagree with me; if the state is to claim control of everybody's labor of course you can't hold this right as sacrosanct.
I agree that a market system requires laws and regulations to function. That doesn't mean we should be blindly regulating in the name of consumer rights without thought for the consequences and whether or not it even works. This is why we have the field of economics.
In this case the intended goal of helping the consumer by increasing their "freedom" probably won't be met. Either because 1. game developers can't get funding to develop future games without a stable revenue model so they stop making games, or 2. they realize they can get funding so long as they never actually give the consumer the full game. This leads to the server model where some core functionality of the game only runs on the server and you buy a subscription. Either way, you start with the intention of giving consumers more ownership of games and they end up with less ownership than they started with.
We could spend the next few days waxing intellectual about what freedom really means and all that or we can realize that the plan just doesn't work in meeting its own goals.
It reduces freedom to make the following deal: "you get it cheaper but you can't resell it". It seems it also forces Steam to do work (implement code to move licenses to another account, support the new customer as after every resale it's likely there will be more support work etc.). It definitely reduces freedom of contract and imo in the wrong way. I prefer to buy software cheaper and don't worry about reselling it later. If resell value is included in price I will just be subsidizing people who do resell their games.
For some titles there is no option to get a "resale allowed version". E.g. I bought a retail version of Borderlands 2 several years ago on DVD (long time post release, was like 20 Euro in a local games store). Well, turned out that DVD basically was a Steam Installer plus key (of course, that's a decision made by the publisher).
Also, "so I can get the game cheaper" - do you? When I buy a newly released game on Steam it's usually in the 50 to 60 Euro range. Most games I buy are a lot cheaper, but they're usually a few years old by the time I pull the trigger.
Still, I also have mixed feelings. If games get a resale value, it will be more difficult to earn money making games. Especially those with great, but short content.
If it really is difficult to make money as a developer I would rather see Valve reduce their absurd 30% cut than use it as an excuse to not allow a secondary market.
On the upside, having resale value is a direct attack on loot boxes, micro transactions, and other forms of in-game financial exploitation. You might be less likely to sink a thousand dollars into loot boxes if you're thinking about selling the game.
Good point. I was skeptical of DLCs when they first game about, but if they're decent quality/effort expansions, then that's fine with me. But games with the kind of exploitation you mention I stay away from, and as someone who regards games as a kind of art, I can't see how our cultural heritage benefits from this... kind of games (I'd like to add some not-so-nice words aimed at the beneficiaries of these "games", but those words seem inappropriate for HN).
Also it can encourage making more expansions or DLC, a good example is Witcher3 , if you deliver a quality expansion each year for a few years then people would not sell the game. I am so disappointed on games that the writers wrote a cool story but you need to wait years between releases(Dragon Age) or forever(Half Life) because the management and developers keep rebuilding the engine or try to modernize a good enough game with a big fan base.
The more I think about this, the more it sounds generally correct to me. It should be proper that a "no resale rights version" is offered at a cheaper price compared to a higher priced "this is an asset you can resell" just like an N64 cartridge or etc.
There are benefits to both models and the user and company should have the freedom to offer both.
I really hope Valve finds a way to fight this. I don't want to go back to pre-Steam PC game prices.