German Consumer Group Hopes To See Valve In Court This Year

[Sofus]

All digital products are considered services. They are not products such as a phone or a retail game. A service cannot be refunded, returned or exchanged for something else once it has been provided. EU even forced Denmark to change the rules to the above mentionend, and unless EU changes it once more, then Valve won't be going to any court.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that digital games are in fact products and are objects to resale, and that any seevice, providing such digital product sales, should also provide a possibility to re-sell the product you own.
In other words, you are wrong.

And in which countries have the laws regarding digital products actually changed?

I actually wasn't aware of the 2012 ruling. But after having read it I have to say that it is so vague that any country which attempts to change the laws regarding digital products will find that the end user might have to pay fees to cover the cost of the transaction.

The distributor will charge a fee for handling the transaction.
The publisher will charge a fee for transfering the game from one account to another (any game which has you register it with the publisher).
The user has the right to return the product within a certain amount of time. A fee for having to deal with that will ofcourse also be required.

What you will end up with are transaction fees which may end up being equal to or even greater than the price of a new game.

 

[Atmos Duality]

One way or another, this shit has to be sorted out before the entire game market transitions into All Digital.
Steam is the biggest and most successful testbed in the mainstream digital gaming market; it makes sense to decide the matter there.

With legally-enforced digital game trading, Steam and its partners could stand to lose a tremendous amount of leverage over the consumerbase (and subsequently, money); at least outside of the USA.

Within the USA, I'm confident the concept of "Consumers rights" in gaming will remain a joke for a long time to come.

 

[Strazdas]

Sensible people wait for the game to go on sale
I have never heard of this happening with Steam. Anyone? Anyone had this happen to them?
Again anyone had this problem? I bounce games between my media, laptop, desktop and even my PC at work with no problem.

Thats like saying sensible people buy used. your point is invalid.
You know the reason i stopped using steam? because it happened.

The ruling is one thing but you really need practical laws and regulations on how this is supposed to be done. Valve could say "Sure, you can trade and re-sell your digital games" and not actually do anything. After all, there is no rule that Valve has to add some sort of transfer system. If it has to add a transfer system, does it have to be done for free or is it able to charge an administrative fee? How high can the fee be? etc

Until there is proper legislation on the books, Valve can afford to sit back and twidle their thumbs.

I agree. but at the speed EUropean Courp of Justice is working i got a feeling it will take at least 5 years to get things spinning. The court actualyl ruled not that "you cna trade and resell" but that "a digital trader MUST provide a way to trade and resell". SO yes, there is a rule, and as has been said last year, all it tkaes is a costumer group suing valve for not doing that (for european amrket at least).
The charge they take or not take wasnt mentioned if i remember correctly.

Those who cheer for the German law to win.

You're basically saying goodbye to

Winter sale
Summer Sale
Easter sale
Any other sale

Do you know why? Because that guy who buy 10 copies of a game will give it to 10 new people and those 10 people might sell it on to 10 other people. Repeat this a ton of times and you'll have a massive loss for the company. Right now a guy can buy 10 copies but those will only be used by 10 people. That is why they can have such massive sales.

Then we have this where companies would want to or demand to take a cut from the sales as will Valve. How much should the company take? Probably over 50% I'd guess.
You'll most likely not be able to sell it over it's original value when you bought it on sale so the profit you make back might be less than a dollar.

Otherwise there would be far less people buying games from the store because everyone would just buy used.

What's the harm?
A VAC ban? It's account based by now. Will that change?

You don't have to worry about it not working because it will work unless the game is buggy but then you can just sell it on again.

No.
Sales will not go away, because sales will be even more likely to make thme profit when 60 dolalr pricetag wont be as viable. Valve has said that sales are the most profitable times of Steam. becuase people buy 6 times as much.
your 10 games resell idea would only work if you were theo nly person using stema with a working brain. everyone will try that, in the end noone will want that game, and you wil lbe stuck with 10 copies youp aid for you cant resell since noone is buying (0 demand). it will be like DOTA2 keys, everyone got plenty of them, result is they cost 0.02.

COmapnies already take a cut from all sales, as thier product gets sold. so does Steam. it is very likely that resale amrket will have some form of system where you will have to pay, say, 10% to valve, which gets shared vetween valve, game makers, or whatever evil corporation hold developers hostage.

once AGAIN, buying used has not killed the console market and it would not the digital one. because there would be more than 1 person wanting to have the game at the same time.

Why do you involve VAC ban? If its account based, it means that person gets banned. if you trade the game, the other person is not banned, as his account isnt tagged, thus nothing harmful for him.
If the game is buggy, noone will want to buy it, so you wont be able to sell it.

Don't think you'll just be able to sell the game at whatever price you want and that you'll get everything back. Look at how much you get back by turning in a game to Gamestop.
Go back to consoles if you want used games. PC have no need for it and you can already trade games on the market if you bought it as a gift. Using that wisely you can save money on it.

Exactly why the first part of your post is completely false. people want to have the "Gamestop option" for all of their games. PC is not an exception, if you dont liked used games, dont buy used, but let others do so. Just because you dont like used cars does not mean you have to ban used car sales.

The exceptions of course would be Valve multiplayer games like TF2 of CS since you need to use Steam to find servers. (As far as I know.)

i dont know about TF2, but in CS you can conenct to servers directly via console command "connect IP" or something like that. and there arep lenty of server lists for that on the internet. probably can do same for TF2.

And in which countries have the laws regarding digital products actually changed?

I actually wasn't aware of the 2012 ruling. But after having read it I have to say that it is so vague that any country which attempts to change the laws regarding digital products will find that the end user might have to pay fees to cover the cost of the transaction.

The distributor will charge a fee for handling the transaction.
The publisher will charge a fee for transfering the game from one account to another (any game which has you register it with the publisher).
The user has the right to return the product within a certain amount of time. A fee for having to deal with that will ofcourse also be required.

What you will end up with are transaction fees which may end up being equal to or even greater than the price of a new game.

The way EU works is European law > National law.
European court deciding something is automatically enforced for all nations of EU. There was a case recently where (i think) Austria lost a case in EU court of Justice regarding the EU law disagreeing with tiher cosntitution. EU law > your constitution. It is the highest level. There is a law that you must obey court decisions (there is no appeal after the highest level), hence what they ruled is law in all europe.
Of course end user will have to pay fees. you alraedy do for regualr used games market, be it gamestop taking a cut or you having to use gasoline to drive to trade or paying postal services. I got nothing agaisnt them taking a reasonable cut from that.

Returning product fees are covered by the salesman in event of returning without given period in pretty much all national laws. though it has to be noted, that videogames are exception from the return policy under the presumption that you can buy, enjoy for 2 weeks and return. (free rental problem).
Transaction fees of the price of a game will not cost the full price as that would simply be not making such trade avialable and would be treated accordingly. Unlike US, we dont allow that much law evasion here.

 

[Cecilo]

As someone mentioned earlier, I really hope the EU courts do this carefully rather than just telling Steam they have to allow trading/reselling.

Most people already know they can just copy their Steam Game installs to a Flash or CD and find a no-cd patch. What would stop people who traded in their games or sold their games from just continuing to play them.

I understand people want to be able to trade. I don't understand why since the steam sales that would be lost are worth more, but that is just me personally. Further, I doubt the EU court can force Steam to buy back the game from people like Gamestop would.

 

[A-D.]

There are actually valid methods of making trading and reselling work on steam, with the current systems we already have. Lets assume its a big sale, take the recent summer sale. Some guy buys 10 copies of Skyrim for cheap. Okay so far?

Each sale-copy can not be put on the market. Therefore you can not sell it for marked up price once the sale is over. This would only happen during sales, so you cant take advantage of it to buy cheap and sell for a higher profit.

They can be traded. But we cant trade for money, we can trade for other items, cards, hats, games even, but you cant make money off them that way, so its again limited.

Now outside of the sale though? Make them marketable, but since steam takes a cut from every sale on its market, you can not overprice it either, say you bought a game for 50 bucks, you cant resell it for 50 bucks since now you make a loss, so you have to price it at 55 bucks, which is more expensive than the copy you can get directly from steam.

Refunding could work in a similar way, just have steam remove the game from your library, you get your money back, minus say a 10% cut that valve takes from having to do the work of refunding you. Now add this and the above together, you can trade used games, at a increasingly smaller price, because valve takes a cut to make the transfer, which means that you CAN resell used games, but you cant resell them for the same net-profit.

Basicly, all the options to do it are already there, just need to be implemented right.

 

[Zefar]

No.
Sales will not go away, because sales will be even more likely to make thme profit when 60 dolalr pricetag wont be as viable. Valve has said that sales are the most profitable times of Steam. becuase people buy 6 times as much.
your 10 games resell idea would only work if you were theo nly person using stema with a working brain. everyone will try that, in the end noone will want that game, and you wil lbe stuck with 10 copies youp aid for you cant resell since noone is buying (0 demand). it will be like DOTA2 keys, everyone got plenty of them, result is they cost 0.02.

I'm quite sure the companies have some say in the sales and when they know that a user can keep re selling their game over and over and with the easy access of the market they will not make much of a profit from it.
If their games ever get to the same price level that Dota2 keys got to, NO ONE will buy a game from them on sale.

COmapnies already take a cut from all sales, as thier product gets sold. so does Steam. it is very likely that resale amrket will have some form of system where you will have to pay, say, 10% to valve, which gets shared vetween valve, game makers, or whatever evil corporation hold developers hostage.

10%? You crazy? Bump that up to at least 50% minimum. The costumer will not be in power in this case. Don't expect to get 90% back from that sale.

once AGAIN, buying used has not killed the console market and it would not the digital one. because there would be more than 1 person wanting to have the game at the same time.

Not saying it will kill the market. It will kill the sales. Do you see any massive sales on Console games every week? :/ Or every major holiday?
No you do not. Some games might get a lower price but a sale won't happen. This is because the money from a single sold copy is already low enough for companies on the retail side and a sale just won't profit them as well as it would do on Digital PC market.

Why do you involve VAC ban? If its account based, it means that person gets banned. if you trade the game, the other person is not banned, as his account isnt tagged, thus nothing harmful for him.
If the game is buggy, noone will want to buy it, so you wont be able to sell it.

Are you serious? :/
Cheater gets banned. Make a new account. Move money to that account. Sell the game for the lowest price possible and buys it with his new account. Or just buy cheap copies from the market.

Cheaters will absolutely love the market if they can just buy a cheap copy to get rid of the ban. They will get money back and they will just cheat more. Bans would need to follow with the game if they ever have to do this.
This could also mean a lot of cheaters would login to old accounts to sell the games again. They might use the same password but a different account name.

Exactly why the first part of your post is completely false. people want to have the "Gamestop option" for all of their games. PC is not an exception, if you dont liked used games, dont buy used, but let others do so. Just because you dont like used cars does not mean you have to ban used car sales.

This is not about not about me hating used game sales. This is about it would kill of all the sales because it wouldn't profit the company that much anymore.
With no sales we have to buy games at close to full price with very few having a price drop. PC Developers might move away from Steam due to this system and go to Origin instead.

You would not lose a thing on buying a used game now. But I'd actually want to support the company through a legit sale than used game sales.
I want to have my winter sale and summer sale and that resale system will ruin it. We haven't had used game sales for 15 years and the price of PC games have dropped a lot and we got these awesome sales. We do not need used game sales on the PC.

Each sale-copy can not be put on the market. Therefore you can not sell it for marked up price once the sale is over. This would only happen during sales, so you cant take advantage of it to buy cheap and sell for a higher profit.

That would be a nice idea but the German law would throw a huge hiss fit about it and claim such rule is not possible. The idea is going to be judged by the same people who thought it was illegal for Microsoft to have IE on their Windows OS by default but Apple is allowed to have their Internet Browser by default. Apple is seems to be allowed to have whatever they want without a problem.

 

[Strazdas]

I'm quite sure the companies have some say in the sales and when they know that a user can keep re selling their game over and over and with the easy access of the market they will not make much of a profit from it.
If their games ever get to the same price level that Dota2 keys got to, NO ONE will buy a game from them on sale.

Companies have some say. they can either A: sell their product or B: get out of business. the C: "you pay us money and we give you a rental" should not exist.
Their games will never go to the same price level as DOTA2 keys unless it is a completely retarded games that NOONE wants to play, or the game is extremely old (think tetris old) in which case it should not be of concern or c: some retard has bought 10000 copies on a steam sale and paid company more than they ever would earn normally and now is trying to get rid of his 9999 copies.
If the game is so bad that after a few copies sold noone wants to keep the game and even the used game market does not want to buy it, hence the price is so low, maybe a company that makes such poor games shouldnt be making them.
And nothing of value was lost.

10%? You crazy? Bump that up to at least 50% minimum. The costumer will not be in power in this case. Don't expect to get 90% back from that sale.

It would be nothing but a legal joke if they deicded to take 50% fee on the sale. This could only work in a world where trade laws are compeltely backwards to any logic. oh wait, thats our world. damn.
and yes, if i were to sell my used copy for 10 dolalrs i bloody well want to get 9 back from it.

Not saying it will kill the market. It will kill the sales. Do you see any massive sales on Console games every week? :/ Or every major holiday?

No it wont. If the game is so shitty that the used market will fully cover it its shitty. if its not sales will still be a viable attraction. in fact sales will be a way to udnercut the used game sales.
COnsoles do have sales on holydays. however they are usually overpricing games yeah. now that consoles are just weak PCs, that wont be a sustainable model. They are already making loses on those.

No you do not. Some games might get a lower price but a sale won't happen. This is because the money from a single sold copy is already low enough for companies on the retail side and a sale just won't profit them as well as it would do on Digital PC market.

but thats a shortcoming solely of retail market and is in no way happening on digital. you dont have retail market taking a cut in digital sales.

Are you serious? :/
Cheater gets banned. Make a new account. Move money to that account. Sell the game for the lowest price possible and buys it with his new account. Or just buy cheap copies from the market.

If you use auction house style this caveat become obsolete.

Cheaters will absolutely love the market if they can just buy a cheap copy to get rid of the ban. They will get money back and they will just cheat more. Bans would need to follow with the game if they ever have to do this.
This could also mean a lot of cheaters would login to old accounts to sell the games again. They might use the same password but a different account name.

And hence we need something more sturdy than an account. i have long suggested to use PCID for banning purposes. it is much better than IP ban, essentially you need to rebuild your PC to spoof that. but it is a bit intrusive as you need to read the hardware. But i guess steam is already intrusive enough for that.

This is not about not about me hating used game sales. This is about it would kill of all the sales because it wouldn't profit the company that much anymore.

and to consumer that would mean what? that we would be able to buy sale-level-priced games from the market in all weeks and not just chosen 3? that is bad how? ANd if the game is popular enough, the used price is going to be high, and thus sale is still as viable profit tactic for steam, so the point is completely useless from a consumer perspective.

With no sales we have to buy games at close to full price with very few having a price drop. PC Developers might move away from Steam due to this system and go to Origin instead.

because thats what happens on consoles. oh wait, they get massive pricedrops.
And going to origin does not work. while steam is targeted here since its the largest, law applies to all[footnote]except those that buy laws, and i guess EA fit in that category [/footnote]. Origin included.

You would not lose a thing on buying a used game now. But I'd actually want to support the company through a legit sale than used game sales.

your not. that is, a steam sale does not really support it. supporting it would be buying at full price. buying it on sale or buying it used your only really giving money to a publisher. most cases the dev gets paid x amount and your money does not even reach them. best case scenario is "vote with your wallet" deal where you buying means they see sequel as profitable solution.

I want to have my winter sale and summer sale and that resale system will ruin it. We haven't had used game sales for 15 years and the price of PC games have dropped a lot and we got these awesome sales. We do not need used game sales on the PC.

and i want pigs to fly, no homophobia and us living on mars. we all have dreams. and all i can do is laugh at your second sentence. we have used games sales for PC even now. that is, for games that are brave enough not to be consumed by steam. PC games have always cost less than console games. the "cheap console expensive games, expensive PC, cheap games" mechanic has worked since the dawn of games.
If we ruin some sale that you like for actually having our rights not taken away from us then yeah, im willnig to pay the price of not having to be sucked into the comment whirpool that is steam sales. sometimes you have to sacrifise soemthing to keep your rights. Havent we learnt anything from history?

The idea is going to be judged by the same people who thought it was illegal for Microsoft to have IE on their Windows OS by default but Apple is allowed to have their Internet Browser by default. Apple is seems to be allowed to have whatever they want without a problem.

Except that apple is not. its just that so few people use apple in Europe its hardly brought up. I udnerstand in USA Apple has managed to penetrate 5% of computer OS market, but here we still consider it overpriced unpractical device. We have much higher PC to Console gamers rating too. were cool that way. We usually ignore MACs in discussinos since most people never even saw one save for a stand on a shop where they glorify one model that doesnt get sold for 2 years.

 

[Poetic Nova]

I have to agree with VZBV, I own the Orange Box 2 times already and I owuld really like to play the HL episodes on my new steam acount w/o the need of rebuying the episodes.

 

[Ympulse]

Everyone keeps saying that reselling digital games is a right, but allowing it could very easily disembowel Valve.

Not by a long shot. But Hitting Valve hard would be good for the industry, as Valve has a veritable monopoly. I don't care how "good" Valve is, monopolies a bad.

 

[lacktheknack]

Everyone keeps saying that reselling digital games is a right, but allowing it could very easily disembowel Valve.

Not by a long shot. But Hitting Valve hard would be good for the industry, as Valve has a veritable monopoly. I don't care how "good" Valve is, monopolies a bad.

They have no more of a monopoly than Microsoft does. CD Projekt, GamersGate and a smattering of other digital distributors all have their finger in the pie. And CD Projekt offers the best service bar none, just not the best library.

By the way, I don't think it's legally possible to resell your gog.com goods, as they heavily encourage you to back everything up to a disk and there's no way they can stop your copy from running if you resell it.

 

[Davroth]

As a German consumer, this is really bad news for me.

If this means that Valve drops support for Germany, I loose not only my software library but also my source for affordable games.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Steam is the one case in which I would say their whole business model sort of balances out resale value. But just because Valve decided to say "Well we know we're contradicting EU law, but if you sue us for it you lose all your games", I'm with the Germans. If there's one thing I can't abide it's EULAs screwing customers out of their rights.

 

[Lightknight]

Eh, I generally spend less on Steam than I do on preowned copies. I feel like the amount of sales they get may depend on the knowledge that the games won't just become pirate fodder. The fact that there are other ways to get the games that do allow me to buy and sell used games makes this better than them being the only source. The way I see it, I am buying a game and then giving it to Steam to trust them to always let me borrow it when I want it. I don't have steam because I want to trade/resell games. I have and use them to have a massive game library. There are plenty of other places I can go instead for a disk that I wouldn't keep. Because here's a secret, when I bought games I never ended up reselling them or giving them away. I kept them and replayed the best of them years later.

Now, the digital market in general? Maybe that does need some reworking. If steam didn't have steep sales I just wouldn't use them or I'd be all for this. But I knew full-well what I was getting into when I joined steam.

IPs are an interesting thing. They can be consumed and consumed and consumed without ever being used up. Imagine if a single hotdog could feed a million people. Hotdog vendors would have a lot of trouble with that. Video games don't benefit from things like a movie launch were everyone goes to see it in theaters and then a second launch later where people buy the DVD. They only have the launch of the disk. They have to compensate for this with much higher prices ($60) but the ease of passing along preowned games can significantly harm that market each time it goes to the hands of someone who would have otherwise of have purchased the game. Think of that as the equivalent of losing 7 or 8 sales (depending on how many tickets $60 would equal) to a movie producer each time.

I'm not saying the preowned market needs to go away, I am a proponent of it. I'm just explaining the impact it has on the cost of new games on us as well as the impact on game companies. It's still completely their fault for over budgetting and not taking this into consideration when setting the scope of game development/marketing/etc, but less preowned games would get them more money (means the ability to produce bigger games) and should give us lower game prices faster.

The thing is, I don't buy games that just came out and I don't generally buy used games except for console games. I am perfectly content to wait a year until steam sales put a big game under $10. So Steam's practice actually benefits me. But I completely understand and sympathize with others who this doesn't benefit.

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

I'd be happier with some kind of claim of ownership of my digital games over having the ability to sell and/or trade them. As others have pointed out, making the option to resell games mandatory by law would most likely mean we can all say goodbye to those industry-wide deep discounts we're so used to by now. Give me discounts along with ownership and I'll be a satisfied little consumer.

Valve will never, ever allow for "full" ownership, however, so I can see how legal resale could be a viable alternative for some people.

Oh yeah, and rework that shitty EULA, Valve -- that's ultimately what caused this whole mess to begin with.

Hopefully people will actually read this article and not defend Valve just because they're Valve. It's about time that digital rights actually gave people some friggin rights. And I'm fairly certain that those EULAs that Steam and Origin and other such systems use are illegal in Europe anyway.

Exactly. This bullshit with limited rights on digital content needs to go and Valve doesn't deserve any defense. Deactivating people's accounts and their games if they don't sign an agreement that didn't exist when they bought their games is ridiculous and the reason I don't get all my games digitally. Like it or not, we're not in control of the games we buy off Steam, Valve is. I don't know how much good this lawsuit will do because its not like Valve owns the licenses to the games it distributes but hopefully it'll push things in the right direction

Well to be fair your games would still be your games. You would still be able to play them off of your hard drive. You will just not be able to redownload them if they are not currently on your hard drive.

** You don't need Steam to launch your games. You can use the .exe files. **

The exceptions of course would be Valve multiplayer games like TF2 of CS since you need to use Steam to find servers. (As far as I know.)

That's not quite how Steam operates. Steamworks-enabled games require Steam to be running in the background, as do countless other 3rd-party games (mostly AAA titles) and Steam-exclusive titles. The number of games that you can actually run without Steam enabled is almost insignificant when compared to the ones that require the client.

Shortly after the last Steam EULA update was released, I ran a test on all 250-odd games in my Steam account specifically to see how many would successfully launch without the client lurking in the background. Less than a third of them managed to start straight from their .exe link without triggering Steam. YMMV, of course, but I would expect similar results for anyone else who owns an equal number of games.

Valve have made it crystal clear that refusal to abide by the EULA agreement means you lose complete access to your account and anything tied to it.

 

[WeepingAngels]

Used Digital still makes no sense. Lending does, but used digital in the same sense that Gamestop sells used physical? "Oh, this copy is cheaper *cough* and we get 100% instead of 30% *cough* because the bits are slightly scuffed due to a previous owner. The H in the CD-Key is also slightly scratched and the cover of the digital manual is missing."

Since you base your opinion on damage taken to a used physical product, let me just point out that a used game from Gamestop (and probably any other used game shop) is guaranteed to work.. Since the data is really all that matters, then a used digital copy is no different than a used physical copy.

Collectors might care about the condition of the packaging but collectors wouldn't be buying digital games anyway.