French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games

I would have paid 60 euros for Skyrim back in 2011. These days, I wouldn't spend more than 10-15 bucks on it if it was new. This is reflected in the price on steam as well, with it currently being sold for 15 euros.

The mere passing of time decreases the value of the goods, just like using a game would.

I don't know what happened that people think that selling things you don't need anymore second hand is suddenly bad just because the goods are on a computer. The car industry would love a method to stop people from buying second hand cars but consumers would never accept such limitations.

Games sales aren't affected by anything past the opening quarter. A study done by the EU on piracy concluded that even piracy is barely affecting the price of games after the opening period. Reselling games will barely touch the games industry.

Adding arbitrary rules just because the game industry is unhealthy isn't a solution to the problem. If I have to give up rights so that people can make some shiny toys every now and then, I don't care about those toys anymore. I don't want to give up rights to keep game developers employed because their current ecosystem is unviable. And, in my opinion, neither should you.

Steam raised PC Gaming back up but it also created a world where we don't buy games any more, but licenses to games. I still try to buy off Humble Bundle or GoG if the same game is available in their store DRM free, even if it cost more.

I can see as it being better for artists, but it's also this weird situation where the license to the game is attached to the person. Physical media can be sold later, restored or copied if it's in danger of not being readable ..and old content is still preserved. Classic games from this era won't really be preserved the same way if any of these licenses servers from Steam/Origin/BattleNet ever go under one day.

You can be allowed to do it, but it can still be a pain in the ass to do it (giving access to your account, etc...).

Same goes for a marketplace that would use that rule to allow people to rent the games. None of theses games has to facilitate the resale and they aren't forced to sell license to the marketplace either (though they could buy license through Steam or anything else, but that would still go with the "pain in the ass" argument).

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.