Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
Having said that, the conclusion is pretty much in line with what many gamers and pirates have been saying: Stop screwing the customer and creating pirates of them.
I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy.
These companies understand hype and the way it drives sales, and then completely fail to use that knowledge when it comes to other countries. They won't wait! The hype has pushed them into getting it NOW, by hook or crook.
In regards to pre-lease, A bit of a stretch calling what Valve does DRM. The pre-release stuff is straight up encrypted. It's a convenience for the end-user to pre-load the data. Once the game gets released you don't need to contact valve's servers for decryption keys every time you want to play.
Steam itself will install any game I own on any machine I log into. Steam competes directly with The Pirate Bay, and wins.
My point is that good DRM can protect rights of both parties , but never does. Instead, if often restricts the consumer's rights in favor of the publisher. Steam comes closest to balancing interests, but falls short as well.
Original post follows:
Who should stop screwing the customer? And how should they stop?
Any discussion of fixing the music (EDIT: or gaming) industry or stopping piracy needs answers to these questions.
One of the advantages of piracy, one of its conveniences, is that you can get anything you want in one place. But no one is in a position to provide this legally. Spotify (and others (EDIT: such as Steam for games)) would like to, but they can only legally provide what record companies (EDIT: or gaming companies... I think I can stop with the line by line clarifying now; the point is that this applies to all pirated digital content) will provide to them. And they will only provide what it is cost-effective for them to acquire and license. They aren't going to have truly independent artists, because dealing with artists rather than labels isn't cost effective on such a large scale.
The only way to overcome this I can think of is a compulsory license for distributing music, akin to the compulsory license for playing covers. But there's no way I can foresee the unintended consequences of such a fundamental change in how copyright is understood.
But whether or not such a compulsory license is a good idea is not the point. The point is that "stop screwing the customer" is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
Steam is missing a few major titles (mostly from EA and Blizzard), but it's one of the most complete digital download services. It also seems to be rather indie friendly.
But all types of digital piracy are connected by similar economical choices of the consumer.
Valve, iTunes, Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix all combat piracy by being more convenient than the alternative. I'd much rather use those services to get what I want.
However, if content is not readily available digitally, then plenty of people have no problem getting that content via piracy. And the reason they do that is simple: the risk of getting caught and punished is vanishingly small. Even when the RIAA was at it's most aggressive, the number of people sued was trivial compared to the people who were file-sharing.
I think it boils down to this: if you are not in the marketplace, your stuff will be pirated. So get in the digital marketplace and "close the buggy-whip factory" already.
It remains to be seen whether Origin can gain any traction as a (currently) single publisher platform, but it is required by their new releases, just like Steam back at Half-Life 2's release.
When 90% of the world gets the game in January, and you get the game in July, you feel pretty screwed. Everyone has already explored and spoiled everything. There's very few people left to have a discussion about anything, because they already know. You get to watch everyone else play the game, wishing you could.
That's assuming the game EVER comes to your country. It might not.
And you'll probably pay more for the privilege, even though the game is worth less, for the reasons stated above.
That is, unless you pirate it.
Localization isn't just bureaucratic nonsense that was conjured up to aggravate gamers in foreign countries - the games actually need to be translated to the local language.
As for if you were living in one of those countries as an expat, as you suggest, that's a very small market and not worth pursuing.
This was especially true a few years back, when some publishers wouldn't release games in the UK until the "European" translation was finished!
TV Series do get around the moment they get on a torrent site, but many many people can follow them thanks to the subtitles provided by fellow viewers. If not they would have a harder time following them.
Uh. No.
Also, most games are not translated at all.
Point is that localization really isn't the only thing that delays a launch in, for instance, Sweden. I guess we have to wait for it to be localized to other parts of Europe before we get to play it in English (or German, but I'd guess that few Swedes prefer German over English). Which is just stupid.
And if it really is translated to Swedish you'd pick English anyway (exception: if you are a group of friends it can be quite fun to laugh at the poor translation).
In a country where you don't dub movies/TV you get quite good at understanding English at a young age and in such a country I don't really think gamers would prefer a localized version anyway.
Steam uses region codes, much like DVDs, to deny you the language of your choice - because they screw with prices by area and don't want to lose this ability.
Even Steam's DRM is too much. If for whatever reason they disable your account or some of your games there's nothing you can do. Your games are just gone. As if someone came in and cut up your DVDs. Except that if you had had DVDs you could just re-download them and your keys would still work.
That's because it can't be broken. You can't break what isn't there. Pre-load only downloads 99% of the game. Let the user download the game sans a few important bits, say the entire executable, and upon release enable download for the last tiny bit. Most retail games release weeks early because it's impossible to stop once the disc hits manufacturing.
Retail discs that require one-time Steam activation can be uncrackable because those important bits aren't on the physical disc. Once a Steam game is unlocked for play it's immediately cracked and released into the wild.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that there's been no Steam game that has not been pirated before it was released, I know for a fact the recent game "Orcs Must Die" was pirated. I was impressed playing it at a friends place, tried to buy it on Steam when I got back home but it hadn't been released yet.
Well lucky you. Steam is no better in this regard than anyone else though; they do region lockouts. Valve doesn't with their games afaik, but Steam certainly does.
The sooner the content world gets rid of silly region restrictions the better we will all be. It is ridiculous that even with trade agreements North American companies insist on charging non-US customers more for a usually sub-par service.
Region coding should be illegal. Or rather, enforcing it.
People choose to become 'pirates' because no one is forcing them to play video games. They have choices—pay for a game, don't play a game (A horrible thing to suggest, I know) or get a game without paying for it (Often called pirating). It's always amused me that people seem to speak of playing videogames as some right that they have and how dare anyone take that away from them.
Add to this that the translations are often very badly broken - my eyes and ears bleed when I play French versions of games. I actually prefer to get the english version through Steam, and I am sure a sizeable fraction of players would agree.
The only successful localization ive seen to date is stracraft2 - so good that I didnt even bother redownloading the english version from Blizzard. Admittedly i havent even been checking out most localized versions for a while - so it may have been improving lately without me noticing.
Translations are often bad and delayed. This is as true for games as it is true for movies or books. I hate it. The obvious solution is to just get the english versions.
But the worst thing is, there is often no legal or practical way to get the english version. Books are easy. You can get just about any english book through Amazon (.de, .fr, .etc). Movies are somewhat bad. DVDs usually include english language. iTunes doesn't feature (many) english movies, but Ebay sells US iTunes gift cards. Games are actually really hard. It is possible to order from Amazon UK or Amazon US, but shipping will be weeks and there is a good chance you will have to pay customs. Steam requires a VPN and a foreign account and a credit card proxy (Entropay works fine). Not what you would call convenient.
If people can't take the time to read the article, they shouldn't comment. Period.
And yes, I almost always check the comments before reading the article (but I always read the article before commenting).
The only way to stop piracy is:
1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated
The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone will expect it for free). This is exactly what is starting to happen.
Back in 1999, there was no antipiracy technology, yet piracy was just as rampant as it is today. We have: Last.fm, Pandora, Youtube, Grooveshark, etc,etc. Yet, people still pirate music.
It's funny because back when Napster first started, everyone said that the artists weren't getting treated right, so that's why they were downloading music. Now that any artist can pretty music start a website with no record label, those reasons have changed.
I don't think it has anything to do with any of those reasons. Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money on something they can just as easily get for free.
This parallels many of the people protesting wall street: Just as investing in an education doesn't mean you are guaranteed a good job, investing your time and effort in software, music, and movies doesn't mean you are guaranteed a profit.
Do they really?
I remember 15 years ago when a lot of my friends started building mp3 libraries, ripping the CDs they had, and downloaded huge amounts of music.
Now, none of my friends have their libraries anymore, or care about it at all. They use Spotify, or Last.fm, or something similar and never pirate music, because it's simply too much work to do it, compared to just searching for exactly what they want in some paid service.
Yet, people still pirate music.
It's also the case that some people will always pirate stuff -- but does it really matter when the market got a lot bigger? To me it's really not an issue of price -- BUT I do refuse paying for crappy content or for content that's too expensive relative to my monthly revenue.
The biggest problems with the movies/music industries for example is not piracy, but crappy content. For instance I go watch movies at my local movie theater, and I regret paying for 25% of all movies I'm seeing, even though I'm pretty selective about it. That's just sad.
Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money
on something they can just as easily get for free.
Other things would be convenience (searching for stuff on PirateBay is totally not fun), free online backup (100 GB on DropBox is $20 / month - and with my current needs, I would need 3 times that storage and constantly growing) and the insurance that you're buying quality.
You see, even if people prefer Free all the time, people also think that quality reflects directly in the price paid. That's why people still buy Nike shoes, even though there are hundreds of brands producing cheaper clones with reasonable quality.
And back to searching on PirateBay, I can't count the number of times I downloaded something, only to find that it was not what I wanted or that it was of poor quality. Sometimes whole hours would pass until I found something that I liked, or until I gave up.
And that's the thing -- some people will always pirate, but other people will prefer buying if it is more convenient. And yet other people have this feeling of accomplishment when rewarding authors that they like (me included) ... like 2 days ago I bought a copy of an ebook called "The Making of Prince of Persia", even though you can find the whole book in the author's blog.
That's refreshingly honest, I like that. No bluster about how it must have happened because they're so awesome and made such brilliant calculated decisions.
I'm sure the publishers and licensing people think they are very clever restricting content to people in other countries, but in reality, they are shooting both feet off.
The old ways are gone. There is now one global IP market, whether they like it or not. They either get with the program or they lose money and die. Sucks to be them, but that's creative destruction at work. You can't differential price, you can't licence in one market but not another. You either release the content for sale to everyone, or you will be worked around.
My biggest gripe is with the UK sports companies - a lot of American friends can legally stream NBA, MFL and baseball via a global site that charges for high quality content. The English Premier League and cricket bodies are absolutely blind to this - there is no way for me to legally watch these sports via the web (and cable TV here isn;t possible in my apartment), even though I'd happily pay through the nose to get a fix. Because of this, I'm endlessly looking for ways to catch games via means that they spend huge amounts trying to chase and shut down.
Now that language and communication face such a low barrier, staggered releases and restrictions by market make no sense.
I worked in an industry (still do sort of) that took a huge hit from piracy, and reacted by making it more difficult to do things rather than respond to what piracy exposed.
While I still worked at a major I wrote this.
TL;DR summary:
I heard a song on the radio, and used Shazam to look it up. The song was "Forgotten Years" by Midnight Oil, and it was 2008. I tried in vain to buy this song legally before having to finally get it through illegal means (torrents). To offset this, I donated directly to the lead singers political campaign in Australia.
As I stated then and I still believe:
"I believe that the ultimate challenge for media providers is to make systems of actualization which narrow the gap from desire to the fulfillment of said desire. The only true way to fight one form of ubiquity is with another form of ubiquity."
PS: Ironically the video embedded in my blog post is now blocked because it was uploaded by the band's non-US label.
Today, installing a game you bought is harder than pirating it. You have to activate it, type in a 25 digit code you found on the box (wait, is that a B or a 3? Damnit.). It'll need an internet connection to activate, but the activation server is usually overloaded and doesn't work on launch day. Then it wants to patch itself before letting you play, because the stuff you got on the DVD you bought is actually out of date by the time you get home. You also have to sign up for some stupid web service that you never wanted, and have another login and password that you must not forget (or else you can't play anymore and your savegames are gone with it). Except if it's GFWL (Microsoft's Games for Windows Live). Then you also have to figure out why that damn thing gets stuck in an update loop and makes you log into things just to play an entirely offline, single player game (then you have to install xliveless, which avoids that). Pirating is so much easier. You torrent the thing, unpack it and play, just the way it should be.
I'm glad Gabe Newell gets this, and it's apparent in Valve's Steam (except for some reason they permit GFWL infested games, but at least they warn you about it).
The only thing the big networks get right is sports.
If I forget to record something, I have to go to Hulu, where I can't stream it to my TV in HD unless I buy another device. My alternative is to pay 99 cents (or more) on iTunes.
I also have to buy a switch so I don't run out of HDMI ports, and it's a pain in the ass to switch between all of my boxes.
Yeah, piracy is starting to sound good.
Oh...forgot to mention that Netflix's selection currently sucks big time.
I can sign up for NHL Center Ice (Internet streaming), but then I don't really get to watch every game online, most are subject to blackouts, playoff games are spotty, Stanley Cup games are nonexistent. And since I don't have cable, I miss local games because it's subject to black out in my team's region.
Maybe it's better with other sports, but I really wish there was an easier way to select a team I want to follow or pay to watch games as I watch them, and only pay for that. The only station that I thought got things right was Telemundo during the world cup, even though I don't know any more spanish than "no hablo espanol". I watched all the games there since I didn't want to sign up for cable to get ESPN for two months.
Basically I'd just like a way to pay for season passes (and actually get all the games) or get a decent sports channel without paying for a bunch I don't want.
Edit: Sorry if this seemed nonsensical, my frustration with finding an easy way to watch certain sports has gone on for a couple years now.
The fact that I can pay a hundred bucks and watch any MLB game live or on delay, on my PC, iPad or TV, in HD, with pausing, skipping to inning or batter, picture in picture, and more... that's mind-blowing for me.
I really wish I could do the same thing with hockey games. I just really despise the idea of either paying a chunk of money and not being guaranteed of watching every game, or paying way more for a bunch of stuff I don't want to get almost every game.
Out of curiosity, what sorts of options do you have in Europe?
In Europe sports leagues (or at least the ones I've cared about) don't provide their own media options, it's all through TV networks. So you can subscribe to Sky Sports channels which are something like $50-$70/month, you can subscribe to ESPN which is something like $20/month (figures off the top of my head), etc. And then you can watch whatever games they chose to show.
And some games in some sports are shown on free to watch channels such as BBC and ITV, but these are highly limited. For example in football (sorry, soccer) you don't get any league games on BBC/ITV, but they will do the world cup (big international tournament every 4 years), and a few other things now and then.
I'd love to be able to pay for a digital service that gives me all Premier League (top level of soccer in the UK) matches - I tried, with a US proxy, Fox Sports' offering in this area, but the matches on offer were limited, and the video quality was truly terrible. It was painful to watch on my PC, yet alone TV.
Resistance to change can be blinding. I have my doubts that such a service will exist anytime soon, however much sense it might make for their bottom line.
EDIT: this is in reference to TV/Movie industries, where this is much less of a solved problem than games and music.
Like their example, Russians were pirating games and software long before Valve or other companies had a presence there, and as soon as they came in, they already had clients.
It was the same with Microsoft's Windows and Office - people got so used to them, for example, in Poland, Latvia, Romania, that they just bought licensed versions when they became available (government orders alone must've made them hundreds of millions in revenue).
Not for life, but rather for the life of Steam as a platform. I don't see Valve going away anytime soon, but you never know...
I would only think in those terms if I could get to live forever.
I don't even have a problem with Origins as a service, but I don't trust EA to keep putting effort into it once they get the marketshare. I trust Valve to do so because they're doing it, right now, as we speak. They even took time out to breathe new life into Mac gaming, a move that earned tons of respect from me.
Using EA's store supports a trend of individual publisher stores and a situation where I have 10 different clients from 10 different companies, something that I am strongly against. It's true that Valve is a publisher as well, but the fact of the matter is they got there first and have proven themselves trustworthy. EA did neither and is now trying to lure us into their gingerbread house with candy and a fake smile. I just don't trust it.
In this case it is about price. I don't like being ripped off, even if the amount I'm being ripped off is slightly less than if I went into a physical store to buy the game.
So far this behavior is limited to AAA titles from publishers other than Valve, so I'm happy playing indie games and waiting for Half Life 2: Episode 3.
Australia has always been shafted in price - a AAA game for $110-$120? Total nonsense, even when our dollar was very low.
Steam is largely what's turned my behaviour around. I've always bought a few, pirated a few, but the convenience of Steam is hard to beat. I mostly wait for specials or bundles, and have a lot of indie games (my catalog is up around 200 games, slightly less than half are unplayed bundle-fodder). Mid-year and new year sales are great times for bargains. But a AAA game at a ridiculous price? Hello pirate bay. Duke Nukem Forever at $80? Good luck with that (not that it's a AAA title... but it theoretically occupies that space).
I've found that over the years, with few exceptions, once a game is played, it's done and I don't go back. If I do go back... it's pretty dated and I realise it was better off in the realm of nostalgia. For me the issue of "but what if Steam dies / goes offline - you'll lose all your games!" is a non-issue - I have a couple of racks of dusty game CDs behind me that haven't been opened in years.
Long story short: it's mostly about the convenience, but partly about the price.
How about a delivery mechanism that uses technology in a sane manner and doesn't punch paying customers in the face with stupid bullshit?
Sounds like the same knee-jerk reaction. (Which usually shows you haven't really understood what I'm proposing.) If the consequences are greatly separated in time from detection, and there is strong bias towards false negatives, then the result will be to give the cracked copies a reputation as an incomplete, half-baked piece of crap.
In any case, DRM should never manifest as anything resembling a bug in the game. It should only manifest as a failure of the pirates to do their job and reduced access to online and downloadable content. Remember, guerrilla warfare is about the long term and not the short term. In the short term, there are defeats and retreats for the smaller force, but in the long term, the larger force is persuaded that the effort is no longer worth the reward.
Absolute containment is the essential failed strategy of regular armies taking on the guerrillas. It's also the source of everything you find objectionable about DRM. (Analogy: the armed force that's unpopular with the local population.)
People will look up the game and see that a level fails to load or the game otherwise breaks at some point, but no mention by the person reporting it that they're using a cracked copy. So they decide not to buy the game.
I'm not even going to bother presenting the evidence that DRM tends to increase piracy rates because I'm sure you've seen it and have simply chosen to ignore it. Just as you've ignored the truly best strategy for deal with guerrilla rebels.
Here's a prime example of not understanding what I'm proposing. This would be the manifestation of DRM as a bug -- which is one of the things I say you should not do!
There are pirate servers, of course, but those suffer from instability, as well as the high probability of disappearing once Big Company X goes after them. That's not a risk that many players want to take, given the time investment that is often made in such games; so they pay to play.
Looking at you Ubisoft.
Online play is a different matter, since you might have centralised server-side authentication. Online multiplayer is a definite advantage to going legit. Otherwise, piracy is nothing if not convenient.
Steam does not let me do this; thus those games are more expensive to me. I do not buy Steam games.
I also get a lot of titles by smaller developers that are only available digitally, too.
This is slowly driving down the price of games (which is a good thing), and hopefully it'll lead to higher revenues for publishers so (the good ones) can continue to make more and better games.
More money for publishers and cheaper games for individuals? I think it's pretty win-win. The second hand game market really short changes the publishers, and it's very expensive to make a top title!
Imagine how much Portal 2 cost Valve to make, was it worth it?
It's my guess that this model will work until the first major publisher, for whatever reason, collapses - or simply stops bothering with providing access to older games. Then people will realize how insane and retarded this entire system of "paying for access" is. Same goes for cloud computing, by the way.
Besides, you are confusing publishers and developers. Valve is a rare case where both are one and the same, making them a very weird exception, but in general, direct distribution is bad for publishers (which is a good thing). It's really the same as with the (major) labels.
>Imagine how much Portal 2 cost Valve to make, was it worth it?
Valve is also a rare case in that they still make games worth playing. Most of the rest of the industry is a sea of bland, uncreative genericness with fancy graphics. I acknowledge Valve for this, but I still refuse to pay for access to games. I want a copy that plays where I want, whenever I want, and that still works three decades from now.
Until this insanity stops, I hoist the black flag. Yarr.
Slightly offtopic, but Wolfire has also written one of my favorite articles/blog posts as of recent, as well - http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-deve...
If you don't adopt this approach, you look more like the normal "entitled, rationalising pirate", a story I see regularly going something like:
1) I want games that aren't just fancy graphics! Give me gameplay, and I'll pay! 2) Oh, so there are these games now. Well, now I want easy access! Give me downloads, and I'll pay! 3) Hold on, I can download? Well, now they're too expensive! Make them cheaper and I'll pay! 4) So iOS games are about $4.99 for a high quality title? Well, that's still to expensive! Make them cheaper, and I'll pay! 5) Oooo, $0.99. Well, that was published by EA, sooo - use a publisher that doesn't use DRM on any title, ever, even back in time and I'll pay! n + 1) Insert new demand here, then I'll pay!
The result here being that, actually, said person didn't actually want any of these things. They just want excuses to rationalise away their taking the work of a group of people that they evidently do want (otherwise, why bother pirating it) without any kind of remuneration so they can do those crazy greedy things like feeding their family and raising their kids.
No, it doesn't.
"The second hand car market really short changes the auto manufacturers."
When you're sold a DVD in a game on it, you're buying the physical DVD to the same degree to which you're buying the wrapper when you buy a candy bar - as a container of the useful purchase. When you're buying a car, you're buying a car.
I think you'll find that when you look at car ownership rights and digital content ownership rights there is completely different legislation and laws for both, and with good reason.
The physical media distribution of a game has merely been a cost effective delivery method. If publishers could distribute their games directly to your device over the internet or whatever they'd have done that as a first option.
If the contract of sale determines that your license is non-transferrable then, well, that's that, if the publisher can enforce it. It's the way things are going for digital content, get used to it!
There are always going to be x% of people who will get hold of the game for free (and x is going to rise as the means of obtaining them gets easier). So let's say 1,000,000 people are interested in playing 'Super Mega Hooper!' and 500,000 will find a way to obtain this for nothing. Before the dramatic rise in pre-owned sales, 500,000 would buy it from a retailer, and 500,000 lots of cut would go to the publisher. Now, only - say - 250,000 lots of cut go to the publisher with the other 250,000 people giving more of a cut to the retailer.
I'd say that over the last ten years of so the average price of a full-price game has remained reasonably constant given inflation, and the cost to produce (AAA) games has risen. Therefore: net loss to publishers using the traditional retail model.
(Of course, there has been plenty of opportunity for publishers to move away from the traditional model, but I'd argue that the culture of buying pre-owned is definitely having an affect on them.)
(http://gaming.stackexchange.com/q/30550/11676)
>I finished both games and I was thinking of reselling them or giving them to a friend to play. However, these are both Steam activated games that had a required Steam registration code I had to enter -- and validate on Steam -- as part of the installation.
Here's the website for CEX - a UK shop - with second hand PC games:
(http://uk.webuy.com/product.php?sortOn=sellprice_desc&mo...)
The problem with used PC sales is that, particularly when it comes to multiplayer games, there is no way to guarantee that the seller isn't going to hang on to the CD key and keep using it.
I've long since moved onto Steam, but I remember very distinctly that before digital distribution, stores outright refused to take used PC games that are primarily multiplayer, and made no guarantees about multiplayer CD key validity for the rest. It's a huge gaping hole in the used market.
Now look at that page you linked to - of the ten games on that page, only one has a multiplayer component, and even then it was far from what the game was known for. Second-hand multiplayer PC games simply aren't resellable.
The people selling them know that they can risk cash on a new game; if it's bad they can sell it secondhand and buy something else. Stopping sales of secondhand games (which is something that some people want to do; and is something that is clearly happening) stiffs the customer. You buy the right to use the content, but you may never ever transfer that right.
This desire to restrict what people can do with content is baffling to most customers yet rife within industry.
When Disney were shown domestic video players they were worried that you could not tell how many people were in the room watching the video; how could you charge people to watch a movie if you didn't know how many people were watching it? See also their attempts to create a "watch once" video.
And all this inconvenience to real customers - people who want to buy games (and who need to sell them second hand to afford it) has zero impact on pirates. I suspect (but have no evidence) that it doesn't send any money to the people creating the games either.
As for the business that resells PC games, they are doing so at great risk to themselves. I'm aware of every small game store in Toronto and I have never seen one that would even begin to consider reselling PC games. There might be a way to do it with a strictly warehouse model but in a brick and mortar situation it's just not feasible. Simply verifying if CD keys are active would absorb way too much time and money.
One business has made a go at it, it's still hardly standard for the industry and TBH I wouldn't buy anything from them and neither would 99% of people. The CD Key system is designed for one user/one seat. Anything past that is strictly on the honour system. As someone who has been burned by pirated hardware carts, I don't trust a used PC game for a second.
This is not a common thing at all, and I still think the "reselling used games" argument is basically irrelevant when it comes to PC games. We lost that fight decades ago, it's time to move on.
The parent asked "Who sells PC games anyway?" The stack exchange question is from someone who wanted to sell / give away retail boxed games with Steam activation.
At the sale prices I would think that the convenience of being able to download it from Steam would outweigh not being able to re-sell it for you.