News EU court rules second-hand sales of digital goods legal

Doesn't just effect games which is what most are forgetting here

 

Say I were to buy a game from you 2nd hand rather than Steam, that's a potential lost sale (I say potential, because I may not have bought the game at the price Steam were charging)

 

Please don't cut the username from a quote, it makes them hard to follow.

Why does that make them greedy?

 

Say I bought your CPU from you? Both products usually become obsolete within a few years but still work. Same difference, why should there be any problem?

 

Because now they have no right to withhold that bought and paid for service.

 

Well let's say Half Life 3 sells 100 copies. Then i want to buy a copy but instead of getting the 101st copy from Steam, i just grab one of the 100 that already exist for cheaper. There's no additional cost for Valve but their total sales figure is now 1% lower than it would have been if games were account-bound. There's no telling how big the effect would be on their revenue in practice, but if it's noticable they would probably look into tightening the belt.

This is actually turning out to be rather tricky to predict, for one thing Steam users have been trained to be thrifty so used copies should become extremely popular, but on the other hand i wonder how competitive the used market would be when Valve themselves have been doing 75% discounts. I guess Steam is a rather unique case and i should go back to thinking about the software industry as a whole.

 

I'm trying to think of it as similar to TF2 trading. Makes things interesting. Buds anyone?

 

Which is fine, but you won't be paying the really low prices any more for your new games.

That still doesn't answer the question, what is it about playing within the rules and maximising profit for the investors or share holders that makes them greedy?

 

I'm not saying whether it's a problem or not, and you can't say it becomes obsolete in the same way since they don't.

I was merely pointing out how it's potential lost profits to them since you didn't seem to understand.

 

I never asked to pay low prices for low games, just a fair price that represents the quality of the game. £20 for Starcraft 2 was great value for money for me.

Taking a scoop and trying to control what people can do with their product is greedy imo.

 

But you are asking to pay low second hand prices which will effect the RRP of new games and the Steam sales etc.

They have done nothing wrong. They are operating within the current guidelines, to call that greedy is a bit naive as all large companies are trying to maximise profit.

It's not greed, it's the socio-economic system that we are all a part of.

 

BUT a CPU is a physical product and therefore has a shelf life at which point it will no longer work and a new one has to be got, whereas a digital copy has NO shelf life, it will never wear out, it will never break, it will never get lost, and will therefore never need replacing because it will always be as good as new.

anyways personally i think Steam will adopt one of the four models i have guessed at above, however not sure which, but probably the first or third being the most likely in my mind.

one thing this could have a interesting impact on will be piracy, especially for music and video as people will pirate things more and blame it on being 'sold' the product in good faith or some such excuse 'sorry Mr lawsuite man, i didnt know it was a pirated copy i was downloading that you have caught me downloading, i thought i was buying a legal second hand version'

 

not just steam that need to adapt

its any company that sells a digital product online with drm protection

pretty huge list of companies

amazon apple google been a major 3 as they all own online stores that sell digital products be it books videos music or games in application form which is still a digital product

Steam is a pretty small pie in the general scheme of things. apple and google have multi billion dollar businesses in the digital consumption area.

angry birds has sold more copys than steam has probably got in total game sales.

Is the Eu gonna press Google and Apple + amazon to make changes i wonder or will they target the small fry companies like shopto.net which probably has 1/million th of the total sales market if that but no major legal team to back them up.

Google apple and amazon can afford multi million dollar legal fights very few others can.

people assume steam and origin are the main targets of this but they are not really, They are small change in an otherwise huge market

apple google amazon are the big 3 and are probably close to 75% of all online digital sales.

itunes in 2011 was responsibile for a quater of all music sold in america they are making billions of dollars a year in sales.

steam had reported sales of around 500million dollars in 2011 ( apple amazon google make 1billion + per quater on there sales as they are published )

if you combine steam and origin ( the 2 big online game resellers ) they wont even 1 billion a year let alone 1bil + per quater.

not just games companys that sell second hand products

digital books second hand on amazon would be nice to see
second hand music for example
videos ect

pretty huge list

 

I can't believe I had to read this many comments before people starting talking about this. I see a lot more downsides than upsides to such a possible change in the law.

 

Games do have a shelf life, most software do, to pretend otherwise is absurd. Most old games no longer work and need adjustment before they can run on today's Operating Systems. So you can compare a digital game to a physical cpu. In fact it's not hard to find a 10 year old cpu that still works but try finding a 10 year old game that doesn't need patched/tweaks to get it to work.

GOG.com are a great example of proving there is a shelf life to games, because they are needed to bring a game back into a working state. It's also a plus that they don't use DRM.

 

Like I said, don't blame the law, vote with your wallet.

 

That is so hard to read!

 

you do rise a good point in this as far as games go, although i am not just on about games - an mp3 from 10 years ago will be the same quality as it was when it was ripped for example whereas a CD is likely to have stratches on it making it skip etc,

there are pluses and minus's to this but i think it is going to be more far reaching than any of us can comprehend at the moment,
and that companies such as steam will either
use it to make money from the sales (steam second hand market place),
find a way to bypass it (25 year leased games),
limit the usability of the second hand sale (limited download within the environment, making the ability to transfer the file between seller and buyer a barrier)

 

Quite. I don't think Valve is planning or should plan to charge for redownloads. All I'm saying is that IF they chose to charge a nominal fee to cover the bandwidth cost of redownloads (which they might choose to do if ever they implemented a game resale function, or else they'd take a cut of resale price), I don't think there would be many complaints.

 

So don't bother. I generally ignore comments from users whose posts are difficult or impossible to understand because they can't (be bothered to) spell properly and use proper grammar.