French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games breaks European law

Re:French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games br... by deadmetheny on Friday September 20, 2019 @03:24PM (#21030272)

I'm curious as to how this gets handled in practice - does Valve get forced into adding a feature to transfer game rights from one account to another? Does it merely make selling your account legal? At the extreme, does this cause Valve to just pull out of the EU market entirely - this is doubtful, but stranger things have happened!

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Re:French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games br... by DaiPlusPlus on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:10PM (#21030727)

It’s annoying that Steam doesn’t have transferable licenses. All of my games are spread-out over 3 different Steam accounts and I can’t consolidate them.

(I made my first account when Steam launched and added all my physical Valve games by CD-key - then years later I forgot the password (And a dead Hotmail address) and also bought the Orange Box and put it on a new account. I created a new third account for myself years ago to make a clean-break with all the dumb Steam friends I collected in high-school.)

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Re:French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games br... by d1zzy on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:53PM (#21031183)

Out of DRM paranoia (before I discovered GOG) I used to have a separate Steam account for each game franchise and a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of them. About 15 accounts (yes yes, I don't own that many Steam games, luckily I discovered GOG before I ended up buying too many Steam games). Would be neat if I could finally collapse them now that most of my games are on GOG (including having rebought games I had on Steam that I actually care to really own).

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Re:French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games br... by Fnoord on Monday September 23, 2019 @05:21AM (#21047234)

I suppose you don't maintain a friends list on those 15 accounts.

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Re:French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games br... by betterbeehome on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:48PM (#21031139)

Pulling out of the EU market is impossible. Tens of millions of Europeans have invested billions into Steam. What does pull out of the market even mean? Stop selling games? They cannot because many games would become broken, as they need steam selling functionality for those games to work. It would leave them non-functional and broken. Micro transactions, subscriptions and DLC, etc. Stop selling would cause many millions in damages and many new lawsuits.

Not to mention none of this is in Valves best interest. Even a used game license market would be preferable to pulling out of Europe...

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Re:French court rules Steam’s ban on reselling used games br... by pkaye on Friday September 20, 2019 @05:33PM (#21031518)

Its really the developers that hurt a bit. Valve already got their 30% cut on the game. They will comply with the laws for existing games. For newer games, expect fewer sales discounts in the EU to make up the loss. Also some bigger game developers will pull out of Steam and run their own subscription services for the EU. Things like Google Stadia start looking perfect for them. And the independent developers will just have to bare the loss in sales.

Its kind of like the SaaS model. Why pay $100 once when you can pay $10/month for years by calling it a service.

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