Found an interesting viewpoint on Reddit. They noted that the French Court hasn't ordered Valve to build infrastructure to allow transferring ownership of games between accounts. They just can no...
They noted that the French Court hasn't ordered Valve to build infrastructure to allow transferring ownership of games between accounts. They just can no longer prevent it from happening like they currently do by banning the sale of accounts in their ToS.
In that case, selling whole accounts for the games is a much different beast, very unlikely to cause a second-hand license apocalypse.
I don't know if this is going to go anywhere, but I do really like the thought of a world in which I can re-sell DRM'd digital media. Both as a seller and as a buyer, I think that'd be kind of...
I don't know if this is going to go anywhere, but I do really like the thought of a world in which I can re-sell DRM'd digital media. Both as a seller and as a buyer, I think that'd be kind of fantastic. Obviously, of course, I can see why an initial seller would be very much against this.
I don't see this going that well for PC gaming actually. I'm no economist/analyst so take what I say with a grain of salt. Being able to resell games digitally means that the value of the game...
Exemplary
I don't see this going that well for PC gaming actually. I'm no economist/analyst so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Being able to resell games digitally means that the value of the game will go down permanently and quickly, physical copies at least have an added overhead of having to do some physical effort, but digital you can make things available at the press of a button. This means that single player games are gonna be less profitable because a large amount of people will be selling them after finishing them, if you can buy a game for 50-80% of the price weeks later there's no reason to buy it at full price unless you're one of the hard core fans.
Indie games will be even more of a gamble, not to mention niche games. The majority of profit for these games is the "tail" of the sales window, this is because they often rely on word-of-mouth for marketing. Now the word-of-mouth can also include a free copy. "Hey you should play this game, I'll give it to you.", but the biggest hit to the tail of the sales window is gonna be the same as 1. above, much less people will be buying the game at full price.
The amount of promotional sales will drop, this is because every time you put something on sale, you're almost saying, "this is the new max for how much you should pay for this on resale", these sales are often in a seasonal event that highlight great games for cheaper. The biggest games hit by these sales are again indie games, this is the one time where they get a free marketing chance outside of the launch window.
Games will stop being sold as product, but instead as services, "pay 60$ to have access to this game for 3 years" and such type of deals, this is already happening on a soft form as games that rely on servers for their multiplayer components are shutting down, and not just MMOs,
There will no longer be an incentive to patch current games. Instead of patching the game, companies will just re-release with some fixes/changes and some added content. This already happens (Call of Duty games, EA Sports games, etc.),
That said, even if what I'm saying becomes true, it hopefully won't be as bad, it's not like the gaming community will just sit there and watch things get worse. Hopefully new ways of monetizing games (preferably more consumer friendly) will be thought of once reality sets in.
Okay, so I also remembered hearing this. I decided to try and find out where it was said and mostly found threads on various gaming forums asks what will happen and someone else makes a reply like...
Hasn't Valve said they will remove their DRM from games in people's libraries if they go out of business?
Okay, so I also remembered hearing this. I decided to try and find out where it was said and mostly found threads on various gaming forums asks what will happen and someone else makes a reply like yours. The best I found was a steam thread quoting a steam thread quoting an email from Gabe and a screencap from asking steam support. I could be missing some official statement, but it looks like this mostly hearsay and questionable statements propagated through forums.
Even if we take this as a reliable source, then these sorts of pinky-promises don't have a good track record, see last paragraph.
I have never looked under the hood of Steam's code base, but just interacting with it makes it clear that this is a mess of legacy code and tech debt. I have no idea how feasible it would be for...
I have never looked under the hood of Steam's code base, but just interacting with it makes it clear that this is a mess of legacy code and tech debt. I have no idea how feasible it would be for them to actually remove all the DRM if they were in a bankruptcy scenario. All the work would necessarily be dedicated to keeping the company afloat rather than maintaining this "un-DRM" turnkey.
I do have a degree in Economics, though I don't use it professionally. This is one possibility, but it is also heavily tied to other variables. One big one is how the game is resold. Can I just...
I do have a degree in Economics, though I don't use it professionally.
This is one possibility, but it is also heavily tied to other variables. One big one is how the game is resold. Can I just sell steam games through steam, is there an independent peer to peer market, etc? The how behind this decision is the most important part, and as far as I can tell, hasn't been determined yet.
I generally agree that this could reduce the total number of indie games sold. Hopefully, indie devs could increase their per-unit price to balance it out.
My counterpoint to this is Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas being $20 5 years after release also wouldn't happen anymore.
I definetely see this being the main way companies avoid this. Its a bummer, but services are already more lucrative than straight purchases and this ruling will only increase the profits.
Some companies will definetely do this, but my best guess would be that bug fixes and performance patches will be split from new content. If I know X company will blackmail to get a playable game, I will be very wary of purchasing the game in the first place.
I also have 2 points of my own to add:
I am much less concerned about this ruling than I would have been when Steam had a monopoly on PC gaming. I am not a huge fan of the Epic store or origin, but they have forced Valve to actually improve steam. Also, if one company pushes subscriptions too far, the other companies can just not be as terrible.
The outcome of this ruling I am most looking for would be a collective pooling of games within a collective. It scratches my crypto-anarchism itch and my love of gaming.
Your points are more-or-less correct. Resale would mean the price of the "long tail" you're talking about would all need to be addressed up-front, so you'd end up with a model where people pay a...
Your points are more-or-less correct.
Resale would mean the price of the "long tail" you're talking about would all need to be addressed up-front, so you'd end up with a model where people pay a steep price for the initial purchase of the game and then resell the license second-hand. Overall it would probably end up making it much harder to break into the market with a standard "pay a fair price once and keep playing" offering. You'd expect more subscription fee or ads or other revenue schemes.
I'm actually not a huge fan of promotional sales type models. IMO, stuff should be worth what its worth and you buy it when you need it instead of needing to a always play this "will it be cheaper tomorrow!?" speculation game. I like Nintendo's pricing strategy for this reason. If I want a Nintendo game the decision is as simple as buying that game. The meta-gaming to get good deals is exhausting and I'm wired to always play it if its available to me. It ends up being a kind of gambling where you're never satisfied and it just leads people to spend money on games they never play. Yuck!
Other incentives they might use are free day-1 DLC packs that only come with initial purchase. That way, even if you second-hand resell the game the publisher can still make some money off you by prodding you to buy the additional levels or cosmetic options or whatever. Functionally they'll make it so the resold copy is an inferior version of the initial sale copy. If they wanted to be real jerks about it, they could even force the save files to be tied to the license so both the seller would need to lose their save and the buyer would need to unlock another save slot by paying or just play the 100% completed slot from made by whoever just sold it to them.
This is why subscriptions are a big thing; because you're paying for continued access rather than for a finite product. It's strange to see a game like WoW come out with a classic mode because...
This is why subscriptions are a big thing; because you're paying for continued access rather than for a finite product. It's strange to see a game like WoW come out with a classic mode because people who own the original game would be out of luck if the servers ever went down. MMOs are in a strange place, but for other games, it makes sense to allow resale.
It could actually benefit Valve because they could double-dip just like Ticketmaster does when they resell tickets: Ticketmaster gets a cut when you buy the original ticket, and they get another cut when you resell the ticket. So going with that example if you paid $100 for a ticket and Ticketmaster got $15 out of that, then you resell the ticket for $50 or $85 (face value) they could add another few bucks on top of that. Not sure if that's how they're still operating but basically, they can re-insert themselves into the transaction indefinitely because why buy from some sketchy reseller when you can buy from the official marketplace?
Well, Steam always wanted to be a platform... But if there was the option of suddenly being able to resell every game you have played on your Steam library to anybody else, the implications are...
Well, Steam always wanted to be a platform...
But if there was the option of suddenly being able to resell every game you have played on your Steam library to anybody else, the implications are vast. Why would anyone publish anything on Steam? Do 10 year old games become the new trading cards? What happens with DRM free games that you could copy and return?
I wonder if there would be a way for steam to somehow tie a game to physical media, i.e. some sort of slip you print or, or usb stick you image. Then users could sell those, rather than steam...
I wonder if there would be a way for steam to somehow tie a game to physical media, i.e. some sort of slip you print or, or usb stick you image. Then users could sell those, rather than steam creating an online marketplace. This could potentially limit the negative effects that reselling would otherwise cause, since it would be similar to reselling a game cartridge.
The crux of this idea would be to make it impossible to transfer the game digitally, only through hand-to-hand transactions or via mail. It's really hard for me to imagine a way for this to actually work though. If they used slips of paper, people could just scan them and send them over the internet, if they used usb sticks or dvd's, people could just image them and send them over the internet.
Perhaps they could provide some special type of DVD, or paper, along with a scanner, to prevent that kind of thing? Would requiring the usage of these sort of items go against the ruling?
If this actually goes down the way a lot of people seem to think it will, I.E. being able to sell games that you already own, it will completely decimate indie and singleplayer games. AAA...
If this actually goes down the way a lot of people seem to think it will, I.E. being able to sell games that you already own, it will completely decimate indie and singleplayer games. AAA companies are already trying to kill the singleplayer game, and if this happens there will be a much bigger incentive to, since a singleplayer game usually has much less replay value than a game like overwatch or cs:go.
Indie games already struggle to make enough money, and due to the restrictions that come with a limited budget usually are a play for a couple hours and then never again type of thing, so they would be frequently resold, making it much harder for indie devs to make a living.
That's going to make replayability a bigger factor. Games that can keep people playing will have fewer resales. PvP, sandbox, and simulation games will weather this better than story based games.
That's going to make replayability a bigger factor. Games that can keep people playing will have fewer resales. PvP, sandbox, and simulation games will weather this better than story based games.
Found an interesting viewpoint on Reddit.
They noted that the French Court hasn't ordered Valve to build infrastructure to allow transferring ownership of games between accounts. They just can no longer prevent it from happening like they currently do by banning the sale of accounts in their ToS.
In that case, selling whole accounts for the games is a much different beast, very unlikely to cause a second-hand license apocalypse.
This is so important, this completely changes the angle most people are discussing!
I don't know if this is going to go anywhere, but I do really like the thought of a world in which I can re-sell DRM'd digital media. Both as a seller and as a buyer, I think that'd be kind of fantastic. Obviously, of course, I can see why an initial seller would be very much against this.
I don't see this going that well for PC gaming actually. I'm no economist/analyst so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Being able to resell games digitally means that the value of the game will go down permanently and quickly, physical copies at least have an added overhead of having to do some physical effort, but digital you can make things available at the press of a button. This means that single player games are gonna be less profitable because a large amount of people will be selling them after finishing them, if you can buy a game for 50-80% of the price weeks later there's no reason to buy it at full price unless you're one of the hard core fans.
Indie games will be even more of a gamble, not to mention niche games. The majority of profit for these games is the "tail" of the sales window, this is because they often rely on word-of-mouth for marketing. Now the word-of-mouth can also include a free copy. "Hey you should play this game, I'll give it to you.", but the biggest hit to the tail of the sales window is gonna be the same as 1. above, much less people will be buying the game at full price.
The amount of promotional sales will drop, this is because every time you put something on sale, you're almost saying, "this is the new max for how much you should pay for this on resale", these sales are often in a seasonal event that highlight great games for cheaper. The biggest games hit by these sales are again indie games, this is the one time where they get a free marketing chance outside of the launch window.
Games will stop being sold as product, but instead as services, "pay 60$ to have access to this game for 3 years" and such type of deals, this is already happening on a soft form as games that rely on servers for their multiplayer components are shutting down, and not just MMOs,
There will no longer be an incentive to patch current games. Instead of patching the game, companies will just re-release with some fixes/changes and some added content. This already happens (Call of Duty games, EA Sports games, etc.),
That said, even if what I'm saying becomes true, it hopefully won't be as bad, it's not like the gaming community will just sit there and watch things get worse. Hopefully new ways of monetizing games (preferably more consumer friendly) will be thought of once reality sets in.
Okay, so I also remembered hearing this. I decided to try and find out where it was said and mostly found threads on various gaming forums asks what will happen and someone else makes a reply like yours. The best I found was a steam thread quoting a steam thread quoting an email from Gabe and a screencap from asking steam support. I could be missing some official statement, but it looks like this mostly hearsay and questionable statements propagated through forums.
Even if we take this as a reliable source, then these sorts of pinky-promises don't have a good track record, see last paragraph.
I have never looked under the hood of Steam's code base, but just interacting with it makes it clear that this is a mess of legacy code and tech debt. I have no idea how feasible it would be for them to actually remove all the DRM if they were in a bankruptcy scenario. All the work would necessarily be dedicated to keeping the company afloat rather than maintaining this "un-DRM" turnkey.
The unDRM is to release the DRM code to open source. It will be DRM free in hours if not minutes.
I do have a degree in Economics, though I don't use it professionally.
This is one possibility, but it is also heavily tied to other variables. One big one is how the game is resold. Can I just sell steam games through steam, is there an independent peer to peer market, etc? The how behind this decision is the most important part, and as far as I can tell, hasn't been determined yet.
I generally agree that this could reduce the total number of indie games sold. Hopefully, indie devs could increase their per-unit price to balance it out.
My counterpoint to this is Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas being $20 5 years after release also wouldn't happen anymore.
I definetely see this being the main way companies avoid this. Its a bummer, but services are already more lucrative than straight purchases and this ruling will only increase the profits.
Some companies will definetely do this, but my best guess would be that bug fixes and performance patches will be split from new content. If I know X company will blackmail to get a playable game, I will be very wary of purchasing the game in the first place.
I also have 2 points of my own to add:
I am much less concerned about this ruling than I would have been when Steam had a monopoly on PC gaming. I am not a huge fan of the Epic store or origin, but they have forced Valve to actually improve steam. Also, if one company pushes subscriptions too far, the other companies can just not be as terrible.
The outcome of this ruling I am most looking for would be a collective pooling of games within a collective. It scratches my crypto-anarchism itch and my love of gaming.
Your points are more-or-less correct.
Resale would mean the price of the "long tail" you're talking about would all need to be addressed up-front, so you'd end up with a model where people pay a steep price for the initial purchase of the game and then resell the license second-hand. Overall it would probably end up making it much harder to break into the market with a standard "pay a fair price once and keep playing" offering. You'd expect more subscription fee or ads or other revenue schemes.
I'm actually not a huge fan of promotional sales type models. IMO, stuff should be worth what its worth and you buy it when you need it instead of needing to a always play this "will it be cheaper tomorrow!?" speculation game. I like Nintendo's pricing strategy for this reason. If I want a Nintendo game the decision is as simple as buying that game. The meta-gaming to get good deals is exhausting and I'm wired to always play it if its available to me. It ends up being a kind of gambling where you're never satisfied and it just leads people to spend money on games they never play. Yuck!
Other incentives they might use are free day-1 DLC packs that only come with initial purchase. That way, even if you second-hand resell the game the publisher can still make some money off you by prodding you to buy the additional levels or cosmetic options or whatever. Functionally they'll make it so the resold copy is an inferior version of the initial sale copy. If they wanted to be real jerks about it, they could even force the save files to be tied to the license so both the seller would need to lose their save and the buyer would need to unlock another save slot by paying or just play the 100% completed slot from made by whoever just sold it to them.
I think a good middle ground would be to require storefronts to allow players to resell/trade licenses for content which has been delisted.
This is why subscriptions are a big thing; because you're paying for continued access rather than for a finite product. It's strange to see a game like WoW come out with a classic mode because people who own the original game would be out of luck if the servers ever went down. MMOs are in a strange place, but for other games, it makes sense to allow resale.
It could actually benefit Valve because they could double-dip just like Ticketmaster does when they resell tickets: Ticketmaster gets a cut when you buy the original ticket, and they get another cut when you resell the ticket. So going with that example if you paid $100 for a ticket and Ticketmaster got $15 out of that, then you resell the ticket for $50 or $85 (face value) they could add another few bucks on top of that. Not sure if that's how they're still operating but basically, they can re-insert themselves into the transaction indefinitely because why buy from some sketchy reseller when you can buy from the official marketplace?
Well, Steam always wanted to be a platform...
But if there was the option of suddenly being able to resell every game you have played on your Steam library to anybody else, the implications are vast. Why would anyone publish anything on Steam? Do 10 year old games become the new trading cards? What happens with DRM free games that you could copy and return?
I wonder if there would be a way for steam to somehow tie a game to physical media, i.e. some sort of slip you print or, or usb stick you image. Then users could sell those, rather than steam creating an online marketplace. This could potentially limit the negative effects that reselling would otherwise cause, since it would be similar to reselling a game cartridge.
The crux of this idea would be to make it impossible to transfer the game digitally, only through hand-to-hand transactions or via mail. It's really hard for me to imagine a way for this to actually work though. If they used slips of paper, people could just scan them and send them over the internet, if they used usb sticks or dvd's, people could just image them and send them over the internet.
Perhaps they could provide some special type of DVD, or paper, along with a scanner, to prevent that kind of thing? Would requiring the usage of these sort of items go against the ruling?
If this actually goes down the way a lot of people seem to think it will, I.E. being able to sell games that you already own, it will completely decimate indie and singleplayer games. AAA companies are already trying to kill the singleplayer game, and if this happens there will be a much bigger incentive to, since a singleplayer game usually has much less replay value than a game like overwatch or cs:go.
Indie games already struggle to make enough money, and due to the restrictions that come with a limited budget usually are a play for a couple hours and then never again type of thing, so they would be frequently resold, making it much harder for indie devs to make a living.
That's going to make replayability a bigger factor. Games that can keep people playing will have fewer resales. PvP, sandbox, and simulation games will weather this better than story based games.