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EU court rules people can resell digital games
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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I actually hope this ruling gets reversed. This has been a known factor in physical vs. digital games for a long time. With a physical game, the publisher only makes money during the initial sale. If that person decides that they want to sell their game later, the developer doesn't see any of the money from that sale.
I routinely buy games on Steam when they go on sale for 80%+ discounts. Even AAA titles that are less than a year old occasionally see discounts up to 50%. It's rare that we can say the same for physical games. I expect that part of this is that game publishers have factored resales into the value.
A digital copy immediately has a $0 resale value. It has no further value to anybody other than the person who bought it. But a physical copy still retains resale value, as it can be resold multiple times. Aside from a few exceptions, if a developer sells 100 digital copies, around 100 people get to enjoy the game. Versus selling 100 physical copies, which results in significantly more people getting to enjoy it. Also, physical games degrade, but digital games don't. Without any degradation, there's no compelling reason for someone to purchase a used game over a new one.
Overall, this lost revenue will have to come from somewhere. This will almost certainly hurt indie game studios, as well as the digital storefronts themselves. Epic Games is already far from being profitable as is. I can only assume that this will end in higher game prices, less sales, and lower discounts. Other possibilities could be limits on number of downloads, as that extra bandwidth comes at a cost, or subscription fees for storing your digital game library. Of course everybody has their own opinions, but I'd much rather just keep the games I've paid for, and acknowledge that I can't resell them.
You are aware, if that was significantly a problem, a dev can choose to sell a game digitally only. It already exists and some devs already do so.
I fail to see your point? Right now a dev can sell their game as digital-only, forego a bunch of distribution costs and other costs associated with a physical release, and prevent lost game sales from resales. If this was to actually happen, they could no longer prevent those lost sales.
As a gamer, there's no longer any reason to "pay" for games. You can just borrow them. Buy them used, and turn around and sell them when you're done.
because the problem you're brining up is that physical sales is devaluing a devs game because its constantly resold. If that is a significant problem, then get rid of physical sales period, but they still do it which show syou how much devs are willing to support physical sales.
Physical games degrade. They can get filthy or stop working. I'm talking about reselling digital games. If I want to play for example the last of us, I would have zero incentive to buy a new digital copy if I can buy a resold licence from someone who already finished it for a much lower price.
On top of that, digital games also don't have to deal with actually needing to transfer between buyer and seller. You don't need to meet up or send it by mail. It's an instant transaction that has a much larger pool of sellers and customers.
its also a transaction that a native game sellign service can setup to allow for a cut of profit if trade is done on the site, which could give devs a tiny bit more money. if the threat of additional aftermarket sales didnt threat when its physical, then why did devs make physical versions of the game. Theres always some room to debate what ifs, but it doesnt stop the fact that resell of physical did not stop devs from wanting to sell physical, and you can't automatically apply it to digital immediately either.
a e-tailer can choose to create an easy to buy system and then charge some % of the selling fee ala gamestop, and choose to also redistribute some of that fee to the dev if the platform wanted to get on the devs good side after obliging to said law. a lot of things can happen and its not wise to automatically assume the worst outcome.
Do you think steam and devs are going to allow the transfer of a game on their platform without their cut?
Exactly. When I sell trading cards, Steam takes their cut. I see no reason to expect that Steam and similar platforms couldn't do the same for games, and share the revenue with the publishers.
The way I expect it to work is that you'd sell the game at a fixed price and the resold license would have some limitations (e.g. no trading cards), and the publisher would make almost at much from that sale as a new sale (e.g. maybe Steam takes a smaller cut, and your discount is the difference).
Steam would likely still get paid, but there's no reason they would have to give the publisher anything.
They would if they want to keep the publisher happy. Otherwise the publisher would just see it as losing sales.
You also realize that a game that you play is inherent resale value all its own, yes?
Not if you don't have the ability to resell it, it doesn't.
Then devs better make a game that people don’t want to resell. Go look at used copies of Nintendo games. Heck, their games are so good, people will pay for them multiple times.
This heavily favours games with a high replayability factor, and games that aren't very repayable aren't inherently inferior. Consider puzzle games or games with some kind of major twist. If you know what to do in outer wilds you can complete it in 20 minutes or so. Similar thing for the witness. These are extreme examples but it applies to things like story based games too.
I bought every ace attorney game on each of their first digital incarnations, including vs Layton and daigyakuten japanese copies when the devs said they would probably never do an English release, and I also bought them again on steam as they became available. As a result I have played all the ones on steam twice and likely will not ever again. I would never sell them.
Games that can be completed in a short time if you have already learned things from a previous playthrough wouldn't stop me if the game was any fun to begin with. I don't do competition or actual timed runs, but I love practicing speedrunning and sequence breaking tech. I would never sell a Zelda game or fromsoft game for this reason especially.
The witness was honestly an entirely... 'unfun' game to my tastes, and the sequence for getting achievement 2 was fucking terrible and I couldn't do it. To be fair the progression and means of learning what to do were good. Most of the time the puzzles were either easy or I couldn't figure them out for a chunk of time, only to figure it out and think that either the puzzle or myself were stupid depending on which. The ending hidden by lack of knowledge/experience with the ouzzles at the beginning thing was kinda neat but also quite annoying. An all around weird game that I have sorted in the '???' category along with Stanley parable. I still don't think I'd sell it unless someone I didn't hate really wanted it and for whatever reason couldn't afford whatever it costs at the time. Even then I'd sooner share my library.