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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
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! :)
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.
Contrary to popular belief not all things put on licenses are enforceable and not all rights are possible to give up in exchange of a cheaper deal(essentially this is the whole basis of consumer protection laws).
OTOH.. it's technically possible to sell your steam games. you just have to sell them all at once(sell the account. you can change the realname if you ever put one in..).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeah, but if the law in Germany says otherwise, then it is the law that applies. That's the difference between laws and contracts (of which a license agreement is just a small part) and it's actually impossible to have a contract to break the law; contracts must be lawful or they are simply not contracts by definition. Even if the agreement says that it is not conducted under German law, German consumers will have the right to use German law anyway. (Well, probably; I've not actually checked what the relevant law says, but there's a lot of similarity in this area across different EU members and I know that UK law is very clear on this point.)
The real question is not whether there's recourse in law, but how any ensuing judgements would be enforced. An unenforceable ruling really isn't much use.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
a game is nothing you consume. Its like a book. you read/play it once, then you sell it to the next person for a cheaper price.
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.
I sincerely hope that that policy includes a clause about the food in question being undigested.
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."
Laws strike down any license or contract. A law will always supersede what's in a contract or license. If the law for instance states that no truck driver is allowed to drive more than 4 hrs without at least 30 min pause, then no work contract can force a truck driver to drive 8 hrs without stopping (even though trucking companies seems to be under the impression that they can do anyway).
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.
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!