Back in 2015, a French consumer rights group sued Valve for not allowing reselling of games, four years later we now have a verdict by the french court and the outcome isn’t in favor of Valve’s Steam platform.
It is interesting that not all consumers and media outlets are viewing this as positive, having the ability to sell something you bought, at least to me, seems to be a fundamental right of the consumer who if they had purchased the game physically which has the same data that the digital version does only printed on a disk.
The argument being that this would cause more and more games to convert into subscription services and act as a mobile platform in terms of how content is accessed.
While many consumers are happy about the verdict and hope that it will affect the Steam platform as a whole to allow reselling no matter the region. Steam is currently appealing this ruling, which again took four years to make, so we may have a long time before we see any changes if the decision holds.
The scariest thing about the case that we found was that Valves primary defense was to try to represent itself as a subscription service rather than a storefront. (cite in french) This carries far more implications then just reselling, seeing that if Valve does see itself as a subscription service, it doesn’t bode well for consumers if Valve chooses to shut down its “service,” leaving Gamers without their library since their “subscription” has come to a stop.
It is unlikely that Steam will cease in the near future, but this does raise some questions as to the direction Valve is trying to direct the platform towards. We already know that Valve would preferably do less than to provide the ideal service, with examples like Greenlight and Curators being Valves way of addressing quality assurance rather than handling it themselves, and their perspective on anything goes as long as you pay the developer fee is just another example of how little Valve cares to do.
What are your thoughts on the matter? Are you in support of reselling of Steam games or against it?