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Valve Sued In Germany Over Game Ownership
An anonymous reader writes "The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZVB) has sued computer game distributor Valve because it prohibits Steam-gamers from reselling their games. Steam users own the games they purchase and should be able to resell them when they want to, just like owners of traditional card or board games can, said Carola Elbrecht, project manager for consumer rights in the digital world at the VZVB, on Thursday. But while those traditional game owners can resell their games whenever they like, Steam users often cannot, she said."
Shame I can't transfer it to another article...
The biggest drawback, as I see it, is longer term not being able to pass the games on to family/friends to play. Perhaps an option is to have a higher tiered pricing which gives you the ability to resell the game later?
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
and sell it too.
Back in the days when you bought games individually, you could share them around the household. So if I had bought say, a copy of unreal tournament 3 and call of duty 2, I could play one, and my wife could play the other on her pc (real example! if you prefer, substitute mate or brother for same effect)
Now, with two online game equivalents on my steam account, we can only play one, as both require being online. Even if it came in a box from retail for cash, you often still end up with a steamworks copy. Just giving my wife access to my steam account so we can juggle offline mode between us violates the ToS which theoretically means they can shut down my account and deny access to all my games, or make most of them non playable online with a VAC ban. Same applies for creating a new steam account for each game; not only would that be a giant pain in the ass, but trying to register the same card for multiple accounts risks the lot getting disabled.
They already have the ability to transfer licences between accounts with the gifting system, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to transfer my games to my wife so she can play them when I'm done with them, other than greed.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I think it's even worse when they're disallowing physical media. I specifically purchased a game for my son (Portal) so that when he was finished playing it, I could uninstall it from his computer and install it on mine so I could play. But, even though it was purchased at a store (Wal-Mart, Target, something like that), and it came on a physical disc, uninstalling it from his computer is not enough. It's already been registered and locked to his Steam account, and after several communications with Valve, they refuse to disassociate it from his account.
If it was just a download, then I could sort of, kind of see the restriction. But purchasing a physical object, like a book or a DVD or a CD-ROM, should allow one to disassociate the application from one account and sell it on to the next person to associate with their account.
I'm not an actor, but I play one on television.
In the west, Communism is decried in part because it doesn't respect the concept of personal property. None of 'your' stuff is owned by you. So why, given that, should we accept for even one second a culture where we only rent and license things from corporate owners? We can't even be said to own the license since there are so many ways a 'permanent' license can just evaporate.
Just because "everybody does it", doesn't mean it's right. There's a certain price point at which you're effectively paying second-hand prices for a game anyway, so the inability to resell them down the road doesn't bother me - a lot of the GoG back catalog (especially when it's on sale!) fits that bill. But just because it doesn't bother me doesn't mean that I shouldn't have that right. More important, though, is the question of what happens when the company goes under, or decides it doesn't want to support a particular game any more. If I drag out my old Karateka discs, and my old Apple II, I can still play it (barring physical media issues, or the computer having a fault.) If, in thirty years' time, I drag out my Starcraft II DVD (or my Assassin's Creed DVD, or whatever), will I still be able to play it? (assuming I have access to a system that can run the code, of course; I'm not necessarily expecting to be able to do the equivalent of playing Apple II games on a Commodore Amiga.)
We're entering a world where physical scarcity no longer matters for a great many things (currently, video, music, and electronic games; this may extend into other items as well in the not-too-distant future); navigating all the issues that that creates will be extremely interesting, for Chinese values of the word.
As a Finn I have waited for this to happen somewhere in Europe. I guess the legislators don't play games or at least buy them from Steam. I hope that this changes how digitally distributed games are seen in light of ownership before every purchase is somehow locked to buyers dna. Tinfoil hats ahoy! :)
GOG doesn't take measures to prevent you from selling their games. There's nothing which prevents you from buying some games from GOG, burning them to a disk, and selling someone that disk. The person who you sell it to won't be able to redownload the games from your account, and if you try to redownload them yourself that's piracy, but there's nothing to keep the person you sell the disk to from using the disk to play the game.
Of course, it would be illegal to sell someone that disk and keep a copy for yourself, but that's also true for a game you can buy in a store.
Taken from the official Steam license. http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/?l=english You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account, nor may you sell, charge others for the right to use, or transfer any Subscriptions other than if and as expressly permitted by this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). 2. LICENSES A. License Terms. Steam and your Subscription(s) require the automatic download and installation of Software onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a limited, terminable, non-exclusive license and right to use the Software for your personal use in accordance with this Agreement, including the Subscription Terms. The Software is licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Software. To make use of the Software, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
People here in Australia often bitch about Valve because of the regionalised pricing of video games - it's not uncommon for some games to cost almost 2x as much as they do in the USA (given the strong value of our dollar).
However, it's not Valve that sets the prices for the games - it's the publisher.
In this case I don't know if Valve are just honoring requirements set by the publishers, or if this just a part of their platform. Either way, I think Steam would be a much tougher sell to publishers if one of the features they provided to gamers was the ability to sell your account at a discounted price to someone else.
(If you want to sell games on Steam, my advice would be to separate out game purchases into different email accounts. Then you can sell the email account and the associated games. I'm sure it's still against T&Cs to do that - and it's a giant pain in the ass - but at least it means you can buy and sell Steam games in discrete chunks.)
Yea it was, but wonder if reason you can't resell your steam games besides ones like assassin's creed III which has striped down version of uplay which you have to register your key with, is the game companies that choose to have steam as their distro platform. Some of them made that call to say they couldn't transfer games. If its made easy to sell a game to another person, protections that are needed to be in place to stop say someone from getting their account hacked and all their games transferred to another person for say 10 cents.
It is an easy problem to fix. Upon transfer the seller's copy is deleted and a fresh copy is provided to the buyer.
Hurrah for posting before reading the whole article and the article's sources. So the ECJ (I guess Europe's equivalent of the US Supreme Court, correct me if wrong) determined that licenses can be transferred, even for downloaded software. The exclusive right to control distribution of a copy is exhausted on it's first sale. So even though this group suing Valve lost in 2010 over a very similar issue, they will likely prevail after this new ruling by the ECJ. Nice going Europe, I only wish we could convince US courts to follow the same reasoning.
Not being able to resell a game is nothing compared to the fact that we can lose all our games anytime with Steam. The license agreement say that Steam can change it whenever they want for whatever they want and if we refuse the new license agreement, then the only option is to close the account and lose all the games we "bought". No refund. We own nothing with steam and considering the current license agreement contains clauses which are clearly abusive (they can do whatever they want with whatever information they can gather from their spyware, err... I mean client software), I'd say Steam is one of the most evil company I ever saw.
Yup. We've got very strong customer rights in Germany. They have a very strong lobby. Multiple of them in fact. Its own fairly powerful ministry on a federal level even.
... insulting.
Everybody still marvels why we haven't yet gone bankrupt. Quality products and quality service might actually be a good idea. Who knows?
Also note the use of the word "customer". Being called a consumer is a bit
20 minutes into the future
I see this as an opportunity for Valve to get Steam installed on just about every PC. Make it so you can "gift" used copies of the game to other Steam accounts.
This will ensure just about every gamer has Steam. The ability for a gamer to make an impulse purchase is now there. Increase in sales.
Let's face it, if someone is looking for a used copy of a game, their urge to play it probably isn't real high.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Merely saying that it is "licensed" doesn't make it so.
It is an easy problem to fix. Upon transfer the seller's copy is deleted and a fresh copy is provided to the buyer.
That of course is dependant on whether Steam are allowed to do this according to their contract with the people who created / distribute the game in question?
I would not be at all surprised if the who way Steam negotiates the very cheap prices they offer stuff for is that the publishes know the use a very restrictive form of DRM that prevents resale. That DRM may actually be a condition attached by the company who actually own the copyright on the game in question. Since many of the games bought through steam have a different form of DRM if bought on disk this is definitely the case for some stuff.
It will be funny if that is the case as this could just end up in Steam having to not sell those products in Germany in future.
Of course there are also the other companies that are following Steam's example now as well. Is Origin (EA's offering) any different in this regard?
I dont read
No. It's Germans who make a contract with a german outlet of Valve, following german law. If Valve's infrastructure is not able to handle the problem, they shouldn't do business in Germany. And a change in an EULA does neither change a court verdict nor a law in Germany. The new EULA has to adhere to german law too, and german law says that either Valve rents the game or it sells it, so either the legal framework of a rent or that of a sale applies. No EULA can change this legal fact.
BS,
In the early 2000s, games (at least all the ones I played) could be installed and played without online activation. Many games did prevent multiple simultaneous uses of the same CD key online which made buying a used copy for online use a little risky but that was about the extent of problems with resale.
Steam was first made available to the public in 2002 but didn't really rise to prominance until 2004 when valve shut down it's WON servers and released half life 2. People bitched and moaned a lot but ultimately desire to continue playing half life/counter strike online and desire to play half life 2 at all outweighed dislike of steam and gamers sucked it up. As the performance issues were sorted out some even started to like steam. Having seen gamers put up with steam gradually everyone else started putting some form of online activation into their games too.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I don't know about that, but I know that the exact opposite can be true too. Games NOT bought through Steam can only be played through Steam. Example: The physical copy of Skyrim I got last christmas.
local laws super seed that contract
It's a crumb! It's a bug! No, its SUPER SEED! Punishing evil-doers with his Embryo of Justice and Sprouts of Righteousness!
And this, kids, is why your Comp Sci and Engineering degrees require you to take a semester of English.
Well that's dead easy to answer. You sell a game or games online, you are already connected to the Internet. "To complete the transaction, click this button to uninstall the software from your machine. The license will then be transferred to the buyer who may then install the software". Not hard, is it? Click or not click, sell or not sell.
As Steam knows every copy of every game and who owns it, I should think that even if you could cheat the system by installing a backup, the next time you were online and Steam is running it could politely tell you if you were being a dick. If you did it legit, you'd have payment (in lucre, Steam store credit or some other goods), the buyer would have the game. Everybody happy, I like that!
Clarification: I've almost always been able to resell my PC games. Only relatively recently has DRM really been difficult to get away from. I've been playing PC games since the early 90s and there was a time without DRM restricted resale.