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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

As a society we need to sort out this simple scenario:

* 16 years old Joe buys a $70 cartridge/disc game, already assuming and counting on the $35 that he'll get back on second-hand sell.

That's it. A simple idea that should never cease to be possible, regardless of the medium.

This particular example made games affordable, and it also inadvertently put a concrete price on several other factors like how much it costs to be a first owner vs. wait for a second-hand purchase, and how much it costs to keep it for your collection vs. allowing the product to flow back into the community.

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> how much it costs to be a first owner vs. wait for a second-hand purchase

Nitpick, but in your example, they would cost exactly the same eventually (other than the effort it takes to sell it secondhand), so no reason to wait.

You're right! that's a bug in my comment then (or more like a spec redundancy I guess) :)

Steam trained a whole generation of gamers not to expect real ownership with resale rights. It's sad. The population old enough to even know this is how it used to be is shrinking.

PC gamers know piracy is always an option. There's even a reliable Denuvo bypass now if you're willing to play on Linux. The real power Steam has over its customers is a lot less than console makers, even if it's legally the same.

This is very different on PC since Valve does not have the same iron grip on the platform that Sony has. If Steam becomes evil and tries to take my games away I'll just download a pirated copy instead. I purchase my games for convenience and to give some money to the creators. I don't need to purchase games to play them. I also can back up my Steam game files and use a crack on them if necessary.

Pirating has literally never been easier than it is today. Even Denuvo's been defeated for the most part, both via VM bypasses and through actual cracks in some cases. If it weren't so sad, it's hilarious that the games even run better without the Denuvo crapware running on top of the game process.

If Steam/Valve decides to turn evil one day, it'll be trivial to just pirate whatever game you want to keep playing on the PC. Not to mention that Steam already allows you to backup all your game files if you so wish.

Steam won because of convenience and all the other features they bring to the table like the community markets, guides, achievements, cloud saves, Steamworks for lobbies/friends etc. Like Gabe said himself, piracy is a service issue, so if Steam itself enshittifies things will correct themselves, which can't be said and done for a closed platform like Sony/MS have.

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