71–80 of 178 posts
I think at least one likely result would be many fewer deep discount sales. Having them would allow a resell arbitrage as people stocked up at the low price in order to resell when the sale ends.
If this ruling is accepted, it's going to go a bit further than "can't ban," right? AFAIK right now, there's no infrastructure for transferring one's games on Steam from one user to another (apart from, say, selling the password to one's Steam account). So would compliance of the ruling imply Steam has to build some kind of digital marketplace infrastructure to allow for licenses to be resold?
Another problem is that the court probably means that you can resell games for real currency. Currently you can buy games with the Steam currency, which means that reselling games is a legit method of piping out real currency from Steam.
How is that?
I think this is a bad idea which will encourage more in game transactions to be profitable. Margins aren’t good enough for the majority of games. I hope this doesn’t expand out of France.
It's not a policy decision, it's an interpretation of current law. There is a very big difference between a legislative body deciding to add a new law as a policy matter, and a court interpreting pre-existing law.
Sweet, time to create a bunch of steam accounts, stock up on cheap games during steam sales, and then resell after the steam sale, undercutting the the "new" version (it's not like a digital resale is any lower quality than the "brand new" one). Rinse and repeat. Profit.
I'd imagine Valve is going to have some sort of market fee to prevent shenanigans like this; they'll probably just slap this feature on their regular community market which already has a 5% transaction fee. Edit: Or better yet just force sell price equal to at-time purchase price when it is bought off the steam store. The law just says they have to allow users to resell games, it doesn't say anything about allowing u…
Presumably Valve is doing this hyper-low prices because they have the ability to and it makes the customers happy. They might decide to thumb their noses at everyone and say "okay fine, you guys are the secondary market now, figure it out yourselves, but we have no reason to give games away for free or sell them for 95% off"
If this ruling is accepted, it's going to go a bit further than "can't ban," right? AFAIK right now, there's no infrastructure for transferring one's games on Steam from one user to another (apart from, say, selling the password to one's Steam account). So would compliance of the ruling imply Steam has to build some kind of digital marketplace infrastructure to allow for licenses to be resold?
I dont see why they would need to create the marketplace themselves. Why couldn't they just let users convert purchased titles back into keys and then sell them on tons of third party key sellers that already exist?
... but they could also offer the option of doing that, but alternatively just letting you transact the game to another Steam user directly, using the in-store currency (with an x% shaved off the top) for the cost of Steam basically working as an escrow service (to guarantee you haven't done something like converted to a key and then sold that key twice).
If doing so is fully compliant with the law, I predict that's what they would do (and it's probably worth the cost to them to pay the lawyers to argue that's fully compliant... ;) ).
If this ruling is accepted, it's going to go a bit further than "can't ban," right? AFAIK right now, there's no infrastructure for transferring one's games on Steam from one user to another (apart from, say, selling the password to one's Steam account). So would compliance of the ruling imply Steam has to build some kind of digital marketplace infrastructure to allow for licenses to be resold?
But Steam already has an extensive digital goods resale platform for all sorts of things from trading cards to in game items it actually includes gifted games (not sure if you can sell these but certainly you can transfer them).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they have to build infrastructure to support reselling game use licenses to comply with this law, it's unlikely they'll be able to justify releasing it to France only; there'll be backlash from their users in other countries.
Companies release features to some regions all the time. For example, in Google Photos, you can search by face in the USA but not Europe (due to differing privacy expectations).
That sucks; glad I'm in the US because I use that feature often. It's great for when friends ask for the photos I took of them.
In any case, I predict the Steam situation will differ because privacy and retail goods are valued differently. Americans are going to want that feature if Steam has to implement it, and they have options regarding what game store they use; it becomes a point of competitive advantage for Steam to switch it on in the States. They'll have to do the calculus on whether they lose more potential developers if they do vs. lose more potential store users if they don't.