It would be cool but they probably wouldn’t pay money directly to your bank on sale. It would still be locked to Steam. Wish valve let you transfer money out.
They literally just need to add a way to “repackage” a game from your library into an inventory item and then they could use the Marketplace they already have
Am I wrong or is this article simply re-reporting a Eurogamer article from 2012? Because the only source this article cited is a 2012 article from Eurogamer.
I see a massive downside to this ruling as a gamer. This is talking about resale of a digital game. In reality what would happen is someone would download a game, copy the file to a harddrive, sell the “digital license” or whatever it’s called for a lesser amount and still own a copy of the game. It’s basically simplifying piracy.
This might actually necessitate game companies to have a hardline DRM approach to their games. Ironically the only games that are protected from this kind of resale are the those that heavily dipped in microtransactions since you can’t resell those and would push the market more in that direction.
IMHO this ruling is shortsighted and pushes for a future with increased monitisation that isn’t in the box value of the game and targets to hurt the Devs that make consumer friendly games while giving games with loot boxes and microtransactions an advantage in the market when talking in terms of overall sales for the devs.
Edit: My mind has changed from the piracy perspective. Still don’t like how this feels from the overall market perspective.
Steam has a sub 2-hour game time no questions asked refund period - what prevents someone from doing exactly what you said using the refund process instead of resale?
As a gamer, that’s some ridiculous whataboutisms. What’s to stop me from buying a physical copy of a game, copying it, and reselling the game? Only time, experience and know how, and yet that isn’t seen as much of an issue. This isn’t any different, it’s just digital.
Most people aren’t going through the effort of buying a physical game or any media these days, it’s why digital stores are so effective. But the other commenter did say that steam already has a 2hour refund window that basically has the same impact so I might have panicked for no reason.
Though my other point about micro transactions vs full box value still stands.
Because pirating games is not something that the majority of the population is either aware of or wiling to do due to perceived difficulty. This can be done through steam which is the biggest host of PC games and significantly less risky than going to some site and figuring out which copy of a game is legit.
Edit: I retract comment, other comment about the steam refund changed my mind.
Any protections to consumers are a win. I think overall this will be a positive for gamers.
IMHO this ruling is shortsighted and pushes for a future with increased monitisation that isn’t in the box value of the game and targets to hurt the Devs that make consumer friendly games while giving games with loot boxes and microtransactions an advantage in the market when talking in terms of overall sales for the devs.
Your last paragraph could hold some truth if publishers think this will affect profits. I don’t know if this would significantly impact profits since we’re talking about a new secondary market that did not exist in the digital space before. There’s probably some historical data for how physical used game sales affect new game sales but it might be hard to quantify since that market has existed pretty much from the beginning.
I would anticipate another across the board price increase for games as a result, but I see this more as an excuse for greed on the publishers’ parts rather than a cost to offset any actual lost revenue.
My problem is traditional consumer friendly sales model for digital games are already on the back foot. This ruling only works to dissuade any new or existing Devs from persuing that model over one with microtransaction.
If anything I want this method of purchasing digital content to be pushed further into any game with purchasable in game items to even the playing field.
This is an important observation; slowly, it becomes better for EA releasing their next singleplayer adventure to restructure: The base is “free”, and then you can buy passes to access the singleplayer world as microtransactions that are not easily transferred.
A lot of RMT content is not easy for a court to define resellability of; think things like orbs that increase a weapon’s stats through a one-time forging process. We don’t want to make that a safer vending process for publishers than full games.
Am I understanding that correctly? That if I buy a steam game, I can sell that to another person who can then download it from steam? That’s going to be very good for gamers and bad for all those corporations. It would, literally, be a dream come true if this happens.
Haven't we had some ruling of that sort on the past where Valve basically went "fuck it,you may be allowed to sell it, but we ain't implementing anything you could do that with"?
Yeah, but if individuals enter into a contract where the license gets sold, Valve would have to abide by it and allow the 2nd party to download the game. If not, they’d probably be sued. At least, that’s how I understand it. Probably easier if they create a used digital game store and just tack on some sort of shitty “processing” fee to make it simple for everyone.
/s: By submitting an encoded JSON post request to Steam’s most overloaded server, users may acquire a sale ticket token, which must then be cryptographically delivered to another user, salted with their Steam user ID.
There are services that will do this for you, but…charge a 50% premium to provide that service, because no technology is free.
Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy - tangible or intangible - and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the licence prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.
Need someone who knows more about EU law to chime in here: does this mean valve et al will be forced to implement a way for users to resell/transfer games to other users?
As others have pointed out, the original article is from 2012, and even with similar rulings in EU countries more recently, it will take years before we see any result of this.
But I think the ultimate answer to your question here is: yes, that would become a thing.
But there is so much to this that makes it hard to predict how good it would be. Who decides the price? What rules will there be on when and how you can resell?
NFT game licences turn digital game sales into used game trading like you’d find at gamestop - except still being equivalent/identical to brand new purchases
NFT is a non-fungible-token. That’s all that’s required for a game licence. What part of that is unnecessary? Are you looking at existing media based NFTs and applying those systems verbatim?
I imagine the unnecessary part is the whole being built on an unwieldy and expensive third party platform when it would be far easier to just use these platforms existing customer database. All major digital platforms keep track of customer accounts anyway so you can download the game more than once, so it’s not like it would be hard to implement a in house transfer system that doesn’t require an irrelevant middleman.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I mean i’d rather register my license of XXX Hentai Boobmania with a govement office than make it permanently and irreversiblly publicly available for everyone to see.
Again, if they can be bothered to host the game, I don’t see how a database that’s smaller than most modern AAA games is more likely to disappear. You could also forgo a central database in favor of each storefront hosting thier own, and just using a private API. More secure too, since it wouldn’t present an easily attack surface for hackers.
The blockchain doesn’t need incentives to be slow and unwieldy when it takes hours to confirm a transaction, and a gas war can randomly delay things even more.
The government would probably have your actual identity, while the NFT is pseudonymous. Granted, the government could also do that. Another argument would be that the government probably doesn’t want to do it.
Again, if they can be bothered to host the game, I don’t see how a database that’s smaller than most modern AAA games is more likely to disappear.
Who is the actual authority on the database? Are publishers going to trust the stores? The stores the publisher? If the operator goes bankrupt, who is responsible for saving the database and keeping it available? Publishers can’t even be bothered to keep selling their own games after a while. It’s a liability, not an asset, noone actually wants it.
The blockchain doesn’t need incentives to be slow and unwieldy when it takes hours to confirm a transaction, and a gas war can randomly delay things even more.
You’d be running the thing in a way where that’s not an issue. It doesn’t even need tie-in with crypto currencies, in the extreme case you need neither proof of work nor proof of stake: All that’s needed is a non-fungible token on a public ledger, run by stores and trading platforms: By the stores because they legally need to provide the possibility to trade the license off-store, by trading platforms because that’s their business. They would then sign off on ownership transfer to a different pseudonymous crypto key (your identity) upon receiving funds in another way.
The NFT is only pseudonymous so long as the account can’t be tied back to an actual person, since most platforms already allow gifting of games to people’s accounts, it would be trivial to tie them back publicly.
The same authority problems also apply to NFTs, does everyone agree to use the same chain and only that chain, if the chain is forked becuse the founders of etherium loose 15 percent of the entire currency on a obvious scam again which version of the NFTs hosted on it are valid? How to the platforms deal with someone scaming someone else by selling them the wrong version on a third party marketplace?
If publishers can’t be bothered to sell their own games after a while, why would they want to sell someone else’s for free, and why would that incentive disappear if they use their own private API instead of a publicly accessible one?
I don’t mind tradable game items too, it would be cool if valve didn’t have a monopoly on community trading. They could still even take an automated royalty cut with NFT trades
Problem there is the gas cost of blockchain is too high. Recording transactions on chain is expensive. It might be worthwhile for full game transfers, but for cosmetics? I doubt that.
You could also achieve exactly the same benefits without adding in the expense of gas fees at all. Indeed that gives you quite a few other benefits like being able to reverse fraudulent transactions and being able to ensure the platform gets a cut.
Presumably becuse their the ones paying server costs to host the game, let you download it again and again on diffrent devices, and manage all the technical issues with the system of getting it to you.
What blockchain doesn’t have high transaction costs once it scales up to large usage? Fundamentally blockchains are about hyper-redundant indestructable storage with expensive costs for writing to that storage to prevent flooding it with garbage. The most mature and sophisticated blockchain that doesn’t involve burning down a forest to solve sudokus is the Ethereum network, which is probably the one to point to when we’re talking about a large blockchain, and that’s one that uses the subcurrency of “gas” to model paying for recording into that ledger.
Are there any blockchains that could handle transaction volumes on the scale of a game-store like Gog or Epic (much less Steam) without putting non-trivial prices on writing the transactions to the ledger?
One example already handling game item NFTs with super low fees loopring.org/#/Another example of super high scalability with extremely low fees ripple.com/xrp/
You’d obviously build a bespoke purpose built solution instead of shoehorning it into some random existing crypto network
Not really, though. NFTs only benefit is to distribute trust/authority. In this case there still needs to be some central authority who will actually honor it and provide the game at the end (either Steam or the game’s creator or something else). It is far more energy efficient for that central authority to also track who has what without performing useless work.
Steam or the creator shouldn’t be a central authority: If you have a game on steam and want to sell it to someone and they then activate in on epic, that should be possible. There should be zero influence from those parties over what happens with the NFT. It would also be legal, at least over here, to procure an erm backup copy from somewhere if you have such an NFT. And the NFT can live on after the original minter (presumably the publisher) went out of business. Say, GOG or archive.org could offer a service where the gamer pays a small fee and they can download binaries+emulation environment for those abandoned NFTs.
Neither the publisher nor the original store have any legal standing preventing any of this because exhaustion. Which is also why you can get Windows keys for dirt-cheap in e.g. Germany: There’s a small cottage industry buying up volume licenses at bankruptcy proceedings and then sell them on, unbundled. Microsoft can do exactly as much about it as Coca-Cola can stop you from selling individual cans from a sixpack.
That’s an interesting idea to me, particularly regarding preservation of games of bankrupted companies. I’d still be in favor of a central registrar as opposed to NFTs, just because of the huge inefficiencies and environmental impact of that (essentially useless) computation.
There would need to be some governing authority dictating that companies need to honor the download of games not purchased from them (essentially the government of each country that has this as a law). It would make sense to me that that same government could host a service to keep track of the transactions. Or, more likely, the government just mandates the companies to play nice and exchange purchase data with each other. Sure, in some sense you’re letting the wolves run the henhouse, but it also isn’t that different from a game company refusing to give you a game you purchased from them. They could do that, but you would take legal action against them. Same thing here.
Why bother with NFTs? every storefront already has a licensing system, the only benefit I could see is being able to move it from storefront to storefront, but they will never go for that. Even then it could be done much more efficiently other ways.
Direct trading of games between individuals. Not locked into one market that could shut down. EA and Steam sell the same game. EA wouldn’t let valve have a monopoly on used game trades
Right??? There’s lots of games I own that I played through once or twice and will probably never play again. I was hoping something like this would come along someday.
i have a lot of fun playing valorant, but in order to preserve my sanity i immediately mute everyone and disable text chat whenever i join a game. if something is important, they can ping it. it makes me sad, because in my experience the valorant lobbies are a coin toss between the sweetest and goofiest people you'll ever meet online, or the most unhinged sociopathic 16-year-olds letting their life frustrations out on you.
i want to meet those sweet and goofy people and have fun with them, but i just can't be bothered sitting through 3/4 lobbies of toxicity until i find one with mentally stable people
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