Valve is sentenced in France for banning the resale of dematerialized games

I agree with @stlpaul on this one. You can remove your license (CD-key) from Steam. If after removal, the key is filtered so another user can activate it, then it's easy to re-sell. I don't get how people cannot see that being possible and say things like, you can only sell accounts and etc.

Essentially they before found that you can resell commercial software. Because why not?

And in logical conclusion they deemed that games are software...

En conclusion, tu as désormais le droit de le faire mais aucun moyen pour le faire.

La décision de justice n'impose pas seulement la suppression de la clause. Valve devra aussi remédier au blocage de la revente donc ils vont devoir prévoir la possibilité de revente.

Small developers got on just fine before Steam even existed.

Are we living on the same planet? Nothing could be further from the truth. Steam more or less catapulted indie games into the limelight

Back when we had to buy physical discs that we could later sell....

And what "indie games" did you ever buy on disc? I've been PC gaming since the 90's, and I can't recall any .... I have dozens of old games on disc around my house, and not a one could qualify as "indie."

I have to echo this Tzaar here.

Back when Steam was new, there was a member of Lionhead Studios (Black & White, etc) who was making a fun little physics-battler game called Ragdoll Kung-Fu. When they announced on their own little forum that they would be selling it via Steam, we were all pretty hype. The idea that a 'nobody' project was being sold in conjunction with anything remotely high visibility (Valve) was kind of a unique thing, and we didn't really anticipate that many other games would be joining it. It felt like the project was 'adopted' :P

At the same time, other indie games didn't have a big customer base. You had to first discover them by total happenstance, and then download them from their own standalone sites and just hope they didn't have some malware of some kind attached to them. The typical model was like an alternate take of the old shareware approach, where you would be able to play a small slice of the game but to get access to all the content and levels, you'd have to buy a license from the games creator on their own page. It was a risk, given the low support and no budget often meant lower quality, and you had no reliable way of gauging its worth. Back then, titles like "Hammerfight" was a rare case of higher quality in the indie scene, but without proper backing and awareness, it didn't do remotely as well as even a half-ass indie title does today.

I mean, can you name ten indie titles or games from upstart / small developers prior to Steam, that were considered successful in terms of returns and not just game quality? Even Ragdoll Kung-Fu, as one of the first non-Valve titles to launch exclusively on the new platform, had limited success despite the transfer of awareness from being Lionhead-adjacent and riding the wave of unique physics-based stuff. Back in the days we had physical discs, you also had to go browsing in stores, and your capacity to sell and trade was limited to people you knew, or far less expansive and well-organised sites that we have today. I'm almost certain that indie / smalltime developers were almost totally unheard of back then due to the prohibitive cost of printing and dispatching physical discs.

Speaking for myself, there are very few games I would sell, because I like having access to many games.

Actually owning those games? That would be even better.

Except that bundling is to each individual dev, an equivalent of selling a copy at a steep sale. Current (legit) bundling chalks you one sale for one interested party, and you have a direct say in where you sell and an understanding of its period of availability at that rate. With total resale rights, each individual sale is likely significantly more than a single interested party removed, but still at one severe discount sales price. The effect this will have on bundles is that their quality will go down, as publishers/developers protect their properties from being even further devalued, whereas games that have very little interest or worth will be thrown into bundles in what amounts to an act of 'sales suicide', becoming almost totally worthless afterwards.

Consider how big the average steam users backlog is. Even if they could only get $0.20 per unplayed and unwanted bundled title, and $2 per 'somewhat desired' title, if there existed a system for easy listing and transferral of license, you know that there would be an immediate rush to cash out so that they can apply said funds on something they actually immediately want. Without proper considerations and protections in place, there would be a market crash of sorts, which wouldn't just be bad for devs, but it is more than likely going to reflect in the effort they are willing to expend in making games and how little they would be willing to allow in discounts. The market crash would ultimately devalue the concept of selling on our games because they would quickly end up like the $0.01 profit margins of selling common trading cards, leaving only the big-name titles.

A bigger concern would be how the current practices of dubious grey-market sorts, vanishing licenses and chargebacks would instead then be directed at other end-users and not just the developers / marketplace sellers. Once there is money in the mix and people learn to loophole and abuse it, selling on could become something of a minefield. General purpose trading would likely operate as intended, but it only takes a single unlucky incident to land you with a lot of pointless hassle.

We used to be able to resell our PC games, but somewhere along the line we gave up our rights of ownership. What exactly was the trade off?
I'm not going to speculate about the panic at the next EA shareholder meeting. They make enough money, and the entire industry has become corrupted by greed. How many games anymore do not have any DLC or micro-transactions? And we don't even own these games...

Yea but it wont be on G2A or Kinguin, so I doubt they will benefit from this.

Where did I say they were digital? I didn't so what is your point?

I just don't see them implementing anything like that.. at best they'll only allow people from France to do it, and create a brand new regional system that will be so restrictive it'll harm the people the politicians are claiming to want to help..

I can't even begin to think how this is even possible considering the EULA we all agree too says we don't own the games...

My assumption is that if they make it closed market EU might take an issue with that again.

I think his point is that you don't really "own" games on Steam, like in the GOG sense you can't download an offline installer that you own forever and not tied to some form of DRM. So if Valve closes shop tomorrow you entire library disappears with it... In a sense, it is a subscription.

https://fckdrm.com/

It shouldn't matter that you pay per game and not per month or year. They call it a subscription, because they only grant you the right to play and you don't really own a thing. Perhaps they should have called it a rental instead. Like those movie rentals back then, where you would pay a few bucks for renting a DVD - you also paid per disc and not per month/year. Still it was clear that you couldn't have sold those DVDs because you didn't own them.
And again, the whole thing might backfire, when they decide they just turn the whole thing into a full subscription with a monthly fee, because it's not worth the trouble arguing.

Unlike iTunes Valve is privately owned and isn't on the stock market. They're going to have a hard time enforcing this. Valve can just block sales in France all together if they wanted to.

This also takes away money from the game developers because instead of someone buying a game they can just get it from a friend instead. I seriously doubt that many game companies would tolerate that for very long. I don't want to purchase games from hundreds of different sources and I doubt there are others that do either. Doing this would kill Steam and Origin and the like.

i mean its still a rule you have to use wins on your own account or you get banned. so i mean there def wont be any win to sell situations. but i would say CV can stay, and instead you just dont get CV for giving away a game you won on SG so you cant abuse cv or else against the rules to give away a game you won ever... we have SGtools site to tell us if someones missing a game on their account that they won on the site. so they would still get banned for sure