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Funny how you can make the same comment about physical goods. Should we ban selling second hand furniture?

With laws like this you generally have to ask what's best for the consumer. I'm not sure reselling is.

The current setup gives furniture salesmen a somewhat predictable revenue model and on the strength of the model they can encourage investors to put ip money to make furniture. Changing the revenue model may change how investors look at the marker. Maybe for better maybe for worse. Who knows, but it would be a disruption if IKEA has to adopt this model worldwide.

The thing that I don't like is if you allow reselling then carpenters get less long-term revenue. This will cause them to focus more on getting a big opening month than making solid furniture that might have years of appeal.

Antilop is still $20 at IKEA. Maybe they only sell 100 chairs a month at this point but that's still money coming in rewarding them for investing in ergonomic chair design. I'd rather see them get rewarded for that than for dishonest advertising campaigns because 50% of their money will come from the first few weeks of sales.

> Funny how you can make the same comment about physical goods.

No, you can't. That's why this is such a complicated issue.

The inherent value in a physical good is consumed with use. If somebody buys a couch and takes it home it becomes a used couch. Used couches are not great substitutes for new couches; they devalue with time and use and you eventually have to pay somebody just to take it off your hands. Its value actually goes negative.

A used digital good is a perfect substitute for the original. A digital copy is also a perfect substitute for the original. That changes everything. If we want people to be able to make games professionally, and to be compensated for their work, we have to use laws to make the digital marketplace resemble the physical goods marketplace. Or find a whole new model which I don't believe anybody has done.

The inherent value for a digital food also decreases over time. Top of the line graphics from ten years ago look bad in comparison to today. Story driven games get their stories spoilt over time, especially the popular ones. Compatibility with controllers and other such devices depend wildly on backwards compatibility (for example, the xbox one controller had loads of compatibility issues with games that only accepted xbox 360 controllers for a while).

I would have paid 60 euros for Skyrim back in 2011. These days, I wouldn't spend more than 10-15 bucks on it if it was new. This is reflected in the price on steam as well, with it currently being sold for 15 euros.

The mere passing of time decreases the value of the goods, just like using a game would.

I don't know what happened that people think that selling things you don't need anymore second hand is suddenly bad just because the goods are on a computer. The car industry would love a method to stop people from buying second hand cars but consumers would never accept such limitations.

Games sales aren't affected by anything past the opening quarter. A study done by the EU on piracy concluded that even piracy is barely affecting the price of games after the opening period. Reselling games will barely touch the games industry.

Adding arbitrary rules just because the game industry is unhealthy isn't a solution to the problem. If I have to give up rights so that people can make some shiny toys every now and then, I don't care about those toys anymore. I don't want to give up rights to keep game developers employed because their current ecosystem is unviable. And, in my opinion, neither should you.

You're still not getting it.

It's irrelevant that graphics from 10 years ago aren't as good as they are today because that only matters for games where cutting-edge graphics are part of the selling point of the game (i.e., AAA games). There are plenty of games that don't try for cutting edge graphics and so look the same today as they did when first released, like Cave Story, Celeste, Fez, Braid, etc.

The point the parent was making is that a copy of a game is inherently the exact same as any other copy of the game, which is not the case with physical goods. A physical good, however lightly used, still has some wear and tear when resold, so it is not the same as a new good.

It's not that they're not getting it, it's that your point is a poor one. A physical copy also came with the costs of storage, storefronts, retail space, manufacture, shipping, etc. None of that is true now. A digital copy costs almost nothing to store and retrieving that copy is again a nearly costless process. The only person who loses by locking up digital goods is the consumer. You're making the same arguments film studios made about VHS, except VHS caused movie studios to make more money than ever because it forced then to make better stories and movies. What do we get now that there's the digital push? Rehashed super hero stories and 90s nostalgia.

> The only person who loses by locking up digital goods is the consumer.

In the short term they my be losing out (kind of. It's like how I lose out when I don't steal at the grocery store.) but in the long term they're gaining because the companies making the goods they're purchasing get to stay in business.

It's a trade-off. Do you want video game consumers to have a short-term boost because everything's free, or do you want them to have a healthy game development ecosystem where talented devs can get loans to make good games because they'll have a predictable revenue stream from sales. You can try to balance the two, but you can't give them both.

Really all of this I want it free, I want it now just leads to free-to-play games where the developer recoups costs through micro-transactions, loot-boxes, pay-to-play items, etc. And in this model you probably never own the game at all. If the user can't be trusted to own the game, then never give them a complete game! Always keep part of it on your own servers. Force them to log in, force them to be connected, force them to have an active credit card number on file.

If we demand to resell/copy/trade the digital goods we purchase without restriction then this is the world we get - we stream movies, we stream music, we connect to game servers, but we never possess any of it. We never listen to a song without Spotify taking notice and putting it in our file. We never watch a movie in privacy without Netflix, "oh, he's watched Fight Club three times this week." We never get to play a game without server-side analytics being run to look at how tweaking the boss difficulty affects sales of the super-sword.

It's not as simple as saying locking up digital goods hurts the consumer.

So, in this case, suppose I lose my phone, then buy a new one, but before opening the box I find my old phone again.

I have spent money on the phone but there is literally no degradation. Is selling the unnecessary phone hurting the industry? How much money is Samsung losing?

The whole "perfect copy" sounds like an invented reason to stop preventing people from exercising their rights to me. I don't see why the quality of a product needs to be degraded before you're allowed to sell it. The market is as big as the amount of people playing your game at the same time, that's how it's always been up until Steam came along. Games were made before Steam and they will be made when they are sold second hand again.

The only difference between hardware and software in this regard is that software actually can be prevented from being resold. I see no reason why we should.

For the case of physical media that contains digital data (like a game on a DVD or music on a CD) this is a distinction without a difference. Should I not be allowed to resell my CDs if they are in pristine condition?

I think the argument being made here is: bad for companies -> companies are less incentivized to make products -> bad for consumers of those products, therefore anything bad for companies is bad for users.

I still by all my console games on physical disc, so I can sell/trade them.

Steam raised PC Gaming back up but it also created a world where we don't buy games any more, but licenses to games. I still try to buy off Humble Bundle or GoG if the same game is available in their store DRM free, even if it cost more.

I can see as it being better for artists, but it's also this weird situation where the license to the game is attached to the person. Physical media can be sold later, restored or copied if it's in danger of not being readable ..and old content is still preserved. Classic games from this era won't really be preserved the same way if any of these licenses servers from Steam/Origin/BattleNet ever go under one day.

> The thing that I don't like is if you allow reselling then developers get less long-term revenue but (hopefully) more short-term revenue. This will cause them to focus more on getting a big opening weekend than making a solid game that might have years of appeal.

But this exactly what happens now anyways.

Not a cynical view point just a statement of what I believe to be facts. I had some interest in making indie games myself, so I looked at the market.

Almost all games sales follow a power curve with most sales falling in the first week. The publishers build a tidal wave of marketing hype months before the game is released. AAAs spend tons of money to build-up to a critical mass of media influencers [e.g. YouTubers, entertainment conventions, TV ad spots, etc...].

Warframe, Path of Exile, GTA V, Minecraft, ect all have long tails. I think we need new categories for different kinds of game sales & financial performance. There certainly are still flash in the pan style sales like you describe, but there's more sustained forest fires too.

It probably bites one-and-done adventure-style games more than games with the replay value of, say, a multiplayer competitive system or a Roguelike randomizer. That's a category already bit by the people who just watch the game played on YouTube instead of buying and playing their own copy; decreasing their opportunity for first-sale revenue increases the opportunity cost of making such a game.

There will always be developers who will make a game as a passion project, but I'd predict that this ruling'd make the market for the potential next Sierra or Telltale even deader than it already is.

I'm pressing F for the golden years of Sierra :(

> decreasing their opportunity for first-sale revenue increases the opportunity cost of making such a game.

I don't understand the use of 'opportunity cost' here but I think it's a good point. It's generally not good to discourage viable business models. My fear is that if we're baking in resale value to the purchase price, now consumers may overvalue both the game AND the resale so they get hit twice in a blockbuster/flop type situation.

Short of offering resale/final-sale options, which I do like, the laws will encourage some sort of business model. I'm thinking encouraging long-term quality through final-sale only purchasing is looking a little better for consumers than what the French court is apparently doing.

Another option is reselling could be done through Steam who takes 30% which they split with the devs. So the consumer gets to resell, Steam gets paid, devs get paid, maybe any lost revenues are offset by consumer wellbeing?

Steam would get ts cut on reselling, and it might give devs/pubs a share. Right now, customers are less and less for traditional single player games.

Would that be compliant? I'm not convinced it would be. What would stop Steam from making their cut 99% to basically make reselling pointless?

The logical interpretation, I would think, is that Steam should have to allow customers to turn their games back into keys.