Steam users free to resell their digital games, court rules
www.gamingbible.com
Those who purchase digital games are free to resell them, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled.

Finally some good news! I’ve been waiting for quite a while for such a ruling.

Edit: Seems this cites an article from 2012, I didn’t notice that (and it’s still news to me). Though there’s still hope that it’ll happen, EU is slow, but usually eventually gets shit done.

  • M137@lemm.ee
    14·
    10 months ago

    As others have pointed out, the original article is from 2012, and even with similar rulings in EU countries more recently, it will take years before we see any result of this.

    But I think the ultimate answer to your question here is: yes, that would become a thing.

    But there is so much to this that makes it hard to predict how good it would be. Who decides the price? What rules will there be on when and how you can resell?

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
      4·
      10 months ago

      NFT game licences turn digital game sales into used game trading like you’d find at gamestop - except still being equivalent/identical to brand new purchases

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
        7·
        10 months ago

        Yep tradable licenses is about the only thing NFTs are actually good for.

          • ryannathans@aussie.zone
            2·
            10 months ago

            NFT is a non-fungible-token. That’s all that’s required for a game licence. What part of that is unnecessary? Are you looking at existing media based NFTs and applying those systems verbatim?

            • Sonori@beehaw.org
              1·
              10 months ago

              I imagine the unnecessary part is the whole being built on an unwieldy and expensive third party platform when it would be far easier to just use these platforms existing customer database. All major digital platforms keep track of customer accounts anyway so you can download the game more than once, so it’s not like it would be hard to implement a in house transfer system that doesn’t require an irrelevant middleman.

          • Pxtl@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Yes, but crypto keys recorded with an owner in a public ledger, so there’s a clear single owner.

        • ryannathans@aussie.zone
          1·
          10 months ago

          I don’t mind tradable game items too, it would be cool if valve didn’t have a monopoly on community trading. They could still even take an automated royalty cut with NFT trades

          • Pxtl@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            Problem there is the gas cost of blockchain is too high. Recording transactions on chain is expensive. It might be worthwhile for full game transfers, but for cosmetics? I doubt that.

            • Sonori@beehaw.org
              1·
              10 months ago

              You could also achieve exactly the same benefits without adding in the expense of gas fees at all. Indeed that gives you quite a few other benefits like being able to reverse fraudulent transactions and being able to ensure the platform gets a cut.