German Court Forbids Resale of Valve Games

sfcrazy writes "A German court has dismissed a 'reselling' case in favor of Valve Software, the maker of Steam OS. German consumer group Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband (vzbv) had filed a complaint against Valve as Valve's EULA (End User License Agreement) prohibits users from re-selling their games. What it means is that German users can't resell their Steam Games."

Comments

Correct Headline

[mseeger]

The correct headline would be:

German court refuses to force Valve Steam to allow resale of games

Too complicated?

Re:Bad ruling

[TheRaven64]

Exactly. I have no problem with rulings like this, as long as Valve can be sued for fraud if they use the words 'buy', 'own' or 'purchase' anywhere in their advertising. A quick glance that the Steam web site shows it listing 'Top Sellers' and says 'buy it once, play on Mac, PC or Linux'. If they are not allowing you to buy the game, then this is fraudulent advertising.

Game theory

[Firethorn]

I remember reading an analysis a while back that actually does a bit of economic/game theory on this, and he found that forbidding resale actually has positive benefits for the *consumer*. Part of his analysis was looking at prices between console games, resellable computer games, and games bought via services like Steam. More specifically, he looked at games with online-playing modes that require servers.

What he found is that with resellable games, gaming companies typically only got that 'first bite' and continued play was essentially free through quite a number of customers. Remember that places like gamestop will buy the old games for a song, and sell them for almost as much as a new game.

With games that can't be resold they're able to price the initial game lower, and keep the profit flowing in. It removes places like gamestop from the equation(so they hate it, of course). Consider that I can buy many year old initially $60 games from steam for like $10. Because the game is still being sold, there's still incentive to fix/patch/expand the game.

Roughly speaking, the results were that new game consumers don't pay any more(the new game is slightly cheaper, on average, by about the same amount as what they'd be able to sell it to gamestop for), used game consumers don't pay more, and the studios get more money vs resellers, increasing their profits and encouraging more/bigger games.