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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

I see this as is something that legislation could fix: digital licenses should be transferable between digital stores.

If I buy a game in store X, and it’s available on store/platform Y, I should be able to play it on both.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case.

I recently bought a Nintendo Switch, and although I’m happy overall, some games have very heavy limits built in (think: max number of units in games), and they’re also available on PC/steam, but I would have to buy the games twice. I just can’t get over myself to do that, I shouldn’t have to do it. At the very least make the license transferable! :)

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This sounds like it could produce nightmare scenarios for some platforms/consumers.

Say I'm a publisher; I can sell my games for 5% cheaper than all the competing platforms and let my installer/store languish. All it needs to do is let people buy the game, and my competitors can do the hard work of actually distributing the game, updating it, supporting features like community pages, friend lists, steam workshop etc.

People buy the game from me because it's cheaper, and the other platforms can pay the actual cost of supporting that license.

Steam (and other stores, to a lesser extent) already does this voluntarily. There's an ecosystem of key sellers of various levels of sketchiness - greenmangaming, g2a, cdkoffers - check isthereanydeal.com. It's almost always cheaper than steam, and you get a steam key. Steam gets most of the upkeep cost, and none (?) of the revenue.

Pretty sure Steam is using early-Gmail accounting: the cost of the services they provide will continue to decrease, while the revenue per user (read: future, lifetime Steam purchases) will stay flat or increase.

Consequently, it's good business to onboard them, even at an immediate loss.

I'd hardly call 3rd party grey market key resellers like g2a something that steam accepts voluntarily.

These keys are often stolen or pirated.

The Steam subreddit has a page dedicated to it https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/wiki/dangersofkeyresellers

The keys from these sites are frequently revoked after they're discovered stolen.

Frequently is a bit of an hyperbole, a lot of my games come from g2a and I never had one be revoked. Most of the time it's just people buying games when they are on discount and reselling after the discount has expired.

Bethesda games are a good example of that. You can pay 80$ for Skyrim VR or get it on g2a for 20$. This is just because the game is very frequently on sale for about that amount.

g2a is a buyer-beware scamfest for sure.

However, all of the sites listed at isthereanydeal.com I have tried are not that. It's not clear what the business model is, but they're absolutely depending on steam to deliver and maintain the content, and it's not clear that steam gets any money out of the transaction.

You can already do that with Steam[0]. They allow publishers to generate keys for free. You could sell the keys on your own store and skip Steam's 30%(?) cut while reaping the benefits of their software delivery infrastructure. There's a fair use policy[1] involved, though.

[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

[1] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3

You can charge a small porting fee to compensate for this.

In practice, I think this actually hurts the established guys. A big reason I prefer to buy on Steam is because the majority of my library is in Steam. A PC gaming library also has more longevity.

In general, I would be reluctant to buy multi-platform titles on the Switch. If porting was available, I would buy certain titles on the Switch or pay to move it to Switch. I would then pay to move everything over to Steam if my Switch died.

Our society is still learning about and adapting to digital goods. The end goal is obvious but unfocussed, we want digital goods to be treated like physical ones. But how do we get there? How do you craft laws to get that result and things still make sense? I'm not sure anyone knows that yet.

Fix price will solve that to. France did it for books. A kind of mfrp: Manufacturer's Fixed Retail Price.

I think that has no sound legal basis but I also don't think that's practical. A launcher like steam isn't just a client-side application and I don't think it makes sense to compel some company to incur the costs of supporting their competitor's customers, which is what that would amount to.

Surprisingly, Disney figured this out for movies with their "Movies Anywhere" service, powered by something they call KeyChest. You create a "Movies Anywhere" account, and then link digital stores (iTunes, Prime Video, Vudu) to that account. All movies that you purchased from participating studios then appear on all of the linked stores.

It actually works quite well. I can purchase a movie on the Roku Movie Store (powered by Vudu) and have it appear as purchased on my Apple TV with iTunes, and all of the big studios are members so not that many films are missing.

You also now get a Movies Anywhere code in the box of most Blu-ray purchases, which works exactly like you would expect and appears on all the stores as if it were a Roku or Apple TV purchase. (Ultraviolet codes are grandfathered in if you have any of those.)

Gog did at one point have gog.com/connect service. Which allowed linking your Steam account and retrieving what games you had there. Then providing your copies on GoG. Still entirely doable and I think nothing stops implementing similar thing.

I'm not saying that Disney should be precluded from undertaking that (and probably exchanging a lot of money with each of the integrated platforms). But I am saying that new streaming start up example.com shouldn't be legally obligated to—at no charge—serve traffic to the entire customer base of prime video, Netflix, Disney+, etc should they decide that they want to get their content through a third party that they didn't buy it from.

Steam is an interesting case, because it actually allows others to sell games on their platform -- developers can generate an unlimited number of keys for Steam, and sell those on third-party key sellers. The biggest limitation that Valve puts in place is that the developer can't undercut the Steam storefront _only when selling those keys_ (ie: if a developer sets up their own storefront that doesn't use Steam keys, they can sell on that storefront without price restrictions).

Moving outside of PC games, I think things get very hard to argue for cross-portability. Each platform has a unique (closed-source) tech stack, and that requires paying developers to write code to take advantage of the features available on each of those platforms. Since portability incurs measurable costs, it's hard to argue, for me, that users shouldn't bear some of the brunt of those costs. If legislation were already in place, such a price could be built in to the product.

The thing is: This has happened without legislation in a very related industry: First via Ultraviolet, and then through Movies Anywhere. Digitally-purchased movies sync between Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Vudu, Comcast, Verizon, and DirectTV. Movies from Disney, Sony, Universal, and Warner Brothers all sync. Imagine the challenge of getting all these tech and entertainment competitors on the same page, and it happened.

The problem, however, is Valve. Monopolies have no incentive to open up to sharing with outside entities. Steam likes to seem open with abilities to hand out keys and such and a good API, but the reality is it is all in service of keeping people locked to their platform. Meanwhile, GOG has shown a willingness to hand out licenses for games you own on Steam, Epic Games has talked about being open to such initiatives, etc.

It sort-of worked for a while, now it is breaking down. The list of studios that fully participate is shrinking. The media giants are now locked in a battle to capture as much of the streaming market as possible. What a mess.

Ports are kind of special though... They require extra engineering so it seems unreasonable to require transferable license.

Mandating transferable licenses across platforms means that a PC player who has no intention of ever owning a console device now has to pay for the engineering of the port (and vice versa for console players).

On the same platform, OTOH, this seems like a decent idea.

I always thought it would be cool if a publisher managed this themselves. If you buy the game directly from them they give you download codes for every platform. Obviously the financial incentive is backwards, and stores might get angry, but I would love it!

PC games are a lot cheaper than console games, should I be able to buy for £9 on PC and transfer to Xbox where the same game is for £40?

Killing platforms that hide their price from consumers by spreading it out to further purchases sounds like a nice side effect of the proposed portability, yes.

In theory this sound simple.

But in particle this bridge between stores is anti-GDPR and can be abused from some stores.

As bad as the HN echochamber is, NFTs.

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