Hacker News Reader

Comment by de_watcher | Hacker News Reader

Another problem is that the court probably means that you can resell games for real currency. Currently you can buy games with the Steam currency, which means that reselling games is a legit method of piping out real currency from Steam.

View on HN

... which would then make many of the in-game gambling systems illegal because it can be cashed out, which would ban a lot of the lootbox gambling games.

I don't really see a problem here to be honest.

They wouldn't necessarily need to implement that though, just a way of transferring licences to someone else. People could figure out their own payment.

There's the problem of needing escrow for selling the game in that scenario; if, say, they implement game resale as "You can ask Steam to cut your access and give you a unique code someone else can enter to gain access," there's the problem that if I buy that code from you, I have no knowledge of if it'll actually work when I get home (maybe you sold it twice?).

... and then Steam can offer payment via their in-store currency (with x% shaved off the top) to basically serve as an escrow intermediary. Win-win for everyone except the developers deprived of first-sales by the new resale market.

Not Valve's problem. Valve is not obligated to provide a framework that makes reselling games safe and easy, they just need to allow the transfer.

Not problem; opportunity.

The same case also says that Steam must reimburse steam wallets when closing an account too.

How is that?

If you sell items from certain games (like CSGO) or redeem a gift card, you get credit applied to your steam account. This can be used to purchase games, then you could (hypothetically) sell them for real-world cash.

Well yeah. But if they are forced to allow reselling of games, I bet they won't allow that. Only games you bought with real money could be resold. They can set more rules too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com