Steam users free to resell their digital games, court rules
www.gamingbible.com
Those who purchase digital games are free to resell them, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled.

Finally some good news! I’ve been waiting for quite a while for such a ruling.

Edit: Seems this cites an article from 2012, I didn’t notice that (and it’s still news to me). Though there’s still hope that it’ll happen, EU is slow, but usually eventually gets shit done.

  • barsoap@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    a in house transfer system

    See and that’s the issue if you want to sell your game you shouldn’t need to do it on steam, it should be a system that continues to exist even if the producer (gamedev) and store go bankrupt, you want some kind of public ledger.

    • Sonori@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Um, if the store goes bankrupt then the game ceases to exist. You would at best have a contextless link that pointed to nowhere.

    • Sonori@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      If the storefront goes bankrupt all that public ledger does is give you a dead link unless another storefront picks it up, but if they wanted to do that they could just as easily buy that database from the dying company anyway.

      Moreover why would anyone else have an incentive to pay the significant costs associated with hosting a game ownership was on a blockchain, and therefore could be sold independently without them receiving a cut?

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        The valuable thing about an NFT is not any text (as in: link) you embed in it but the fact that it has been minted by someone to mean something. A publisher minting a game NFT would be saying “this token is a proof of license”, same as companies (once upon a time) handed out slips of paper saying “this token is proof of ownership of a share in our company”.

        Moreover why would anyone else have an incentive to pay the significant costs associated with hosting a game ownership was on a blockchain, and therefore could be sold independently without them receiving a cut?

        You could charge for it. It’s essentially fancy cloud storage. Also, archive.org.

        • Sonori@beehaw.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          Archive.org is well, a non profit archive, not a storefront. If you used NFTs and wanted to charge for it, you would need to charge per download. Finally, while a NFT could provide a proof of license, so could any other database.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            1·
            1 year ago

            GOG might let you do it if you buy a game from them once in a while. Steam constantly subsidises downloads by allowing devs to mint and sell their own steam keys, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue.

            And, yes, you could have a database somewhere – but then the proof of ownership might disappear with that database, e.g. when the publisher goes bankrupt. Also the publisher has incentives to make ownership transfers awkward, slow, etc, the blockchain doesn’t.

            Another option would be the equivalent of a central bank, some public institution (as in public law) which keeps the database. But do you really want to register your ownership of a license of XXX Hentai Boobmania with the copyright office?

            Don’t get me wrong I’m far from a cryptobro. It’s just that trading licenses independently of stores is about the one thing the tech is actually good for.