All these lawsuits are great, but lets discuss how we can't resell our digital games.

[Nilaul]

All this lawsuits are great, but lets discuss how we can't resell our digital games (and the price of digital games)

Why can't we transfer ownership of our title to someone else? We paid for our software (or license) often full price (clearly evident in new console releases), yet we don't get the same rights.

Are people ok with that? Are people ok that you pay more for digital then for physical and you essentially get a worse deal? We paying a premium when the only price overhead is essence, hosting files on a server (as opposing physical). At very least digital should be cheaper then physical, as to reflect less user rights and less overhead.

Digital has been turned into a clear cash grab by the publishers, whilst consumers end up being abused and their rights eroded, and as evident as it is here, many of you have grown accustomed to paying the full physical price on something that should have been in fact cheaper upon release in digital stores.

 

[Transistor]

You can't sell what you don't own and you don't own digital games. You own a non-transferrable license to play said digital games.

It sucks, yeah, but at least the option is still there for physical (for the most part)

 

[EvilBoris]

Don't go there, before you know it we'll have limited numbers of digital games and NFTs

 

[Deleted member 70788]

Can you resell any digital media?

I am personally ok with not being able to resell it. I barely resale physical media either.

 

[Deleted member 3190]

If the platforms were opened up to multiple stores you may get a retailer that would allow that. Highly unlikely, but you never know.

 

[Windu]

That would be great. At the very least to be able to resell delisted games.

There is this though, not sure if anything will come of it.

How To Resell Your Digital Video Games

www.robotcache.com

 

[benzopil]

You also can't resell your physical copies AFAIK. At least that's what user agreement says.

 

[Tiny Chihuahueño]

Digital games are not yours to keep, you're borrowing them for an undefined time limit (essentially whenever the company feels like it or they store goes down for whatever reason). Why would they let you sell what is not yours?

 

[Strandr]

You can't sell what you don't own and you don't own digital games. You own a non-transferrable license to play said digital games.

It sucks, yeah, but at least the option is still there for physical (for the most part)

Click to shrink...

And that's thread

Edit: Also crazy to think that while the Xbox One announcement had a lot wrong with it, that there were a few points there that they were ahead of the times with

 

[karnage10]

IMO if a store wants to comepte with steam. THis is the killer feature that could push a lot of users to spend money there

 

[Nilaul]

Can you resell any digital media?

I am personally ok with not being able to resell it. I barely resale physical media either.

Click to shrink...

I would be ok too if they actually cost less, but they don't, they cost more.

 

[Border]

Can't resell your digital music or digital movies either. People would rather give up their rights for the convenience of downloading.

 

[Chromie]

All this lawsuits are great, but lets discuss how we can't resell our digital games.
Why cant we transfer ownership of our title to someone else? We paid for our software often full price, yet we don't get the same rights. Are people ok with that? Are people ok that you pay more for digital then for physical and you essentially get a worse deal?

Click to shrink...

Yes, I'm okay with it. Don't bu

 

[Kill3r7]

At the crux of it, is the legalese we all agree to prior to buying our digital games. We cannot resell the license "sold" to us. The caselaw in this area is not particularly favorable (at least that was the case a decade ago).

 

[MoosGoMoo]

I'll be clinging on to discs on consoles til they stop being printed.

But even then, these discs rely on servers now to get updates/download the actual game.

Consumer rights have eroded and everyone bent over and took it, and now it's too late. This is the future.

 

[Rickenslacker]

It's a trade off, but how would it logistically even work? It's nice to say "I want it, I don't care that I can't think of a way it could possibly work, it just should be done!" but ah, easier said than done.

 

[LinkStrikesBack]

That would be great. At the very least to be able to resell delisted games.

There is this though, not sure if anything will come of it.

How To Resell Your Digital Video Games

www.robotcache.com

Click to shrink...

If they can't sell the game as new, they're sure as hell not going to be able to legally distribute them like either.

 

[yyr]

Physical goods are tangible. There is a definite difference between a physical good that is unopened or "new" versus one that is opened, used, or in poor condition.

There is no discernible difference between a digital good that is "new" versus one that is "used." If person A transfers a digital good to person B, who then transfers it to person C, that is two sales lost to the developer/publisher.

If you recall, Microsoft *was* working on something like this (with strings attached, as the publishers insisted) back in 2013, but the players thoroughly rejected it. So here we are. Until we figure out some way to address that, things are going to stay the way they are.

 

[CitizenVectron]

Way back in the long-ago time (I think maybe 2007-ish?) my best friend decided to buy someone's Steam account for $200, and it had hundreds of games. He played it for around a month or two and then the other guy took it back (using some sort of password recovery, I imagine). When he contact Steam, they told him tough luck, you can't buy Steam accounts or digital titles.

 

[Deleted member 70788]

I would be ok too if they actually costed less, but they don't they cost more.

Click to shrink...

That's fair, but often they don't cost more depending on sales.

If people didn't buy it, it'd drop in price - so obviously the numbers work out for companies. Only thing you can really control is your response to it.

 

[delete12345]

Don't go there, before you know it we'll have limited numbers of digital games and NFTs

Click to shrink...

Hmmm, can you legally make a digital game an NFT? They didn't define NFTs as non-interactive tokens yet.

 

[EagleClaw]

You don't own the games, you just payed for a user license.

Of course it would be nice to be able to buy games and sell them.

 

[LinkStrikesBack]

IMO if a store wants to comepte with steam. THis is the killer feature that could push a lot of users to spend money there

Click to shrink...

You'd never get third party support because either you cut the actual developers entirely out of sales past the first day (because there's no reason to ever buy a new copy over used with these hypothetical digitals). For the same reason you'd have a very hard time to support first party development too. Or you basically give no money to the person doing the reselling, which makes this practically pointless.

The idea of digital reselling is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy market for developers of all levels.

 

[Nilaul]

You can't sell what you don't own and you don't own digital games. You own a non-transferrable license to play said digital games.

It sucks, yeah, but at least the option is still there for physical (for the most part)

Click to shrink...

It is still vastly unfair. Considering that they charge full price for software, when the only true overhead cost are server costs.

 

[Svejk]

They can at least benefit digital purchasers with a type of in store credit. Kind of similar to Google Play and SIE points, but a less frugal. But that is asking too much I suppose. lol

 

[Transistor]

It is still vastly unfair. Considering that they charge full price for software, when the only true overhead cost are server costs.

Click to shrink...

I don't disagree it's unfair, but until there are laws in place about actual ownership of digital goods, nothing will change.

Plus, like others have mentioned, this would make developers not want to sell digitally as it cuts a lot of their profit out.

 

[Neural]

Adding to what others said:

1 - it needs a very well thought-out, fraud-free technical infrastructure (that costs money)
2 - both platform holders and publishers would still require their slice of cake. Why allow someone to exchange digital games when they can wait for the next sale and still give you money?

Given these two points, either "used" digital games would cost too much, or the seller would get a very low profit out of it.

 

[Sandersson]

I dont get whats the problem? The faster we get rid of second hand market the better. Devs/pubs get the money from every transaction of their product like they should.

 

[CloudsFromSpace]

You'd need way more than a simple lawsuit to change this. You'd need a statutory change that explicitly includes digital software licenses under the right of first sale. Otherwise no court is going to say that a license constitutes a sale that exhausts the right, regardless of how "sale-like" it seems.

 

[Man Called Aerodynamics]

It sure would be nice have a mechanism to to perform a license transfer for games that have been delisted and are no longer sold, at the very least.

I'd love to buy a digital copy of Outrun 2 XBLA, and there are probably tons of people out there who own it but will never play it again. But alas.

 

[AppleMIX]

Digital used good is a oxymoron. A digital used game is identical to a new digital game. Why would anyone buy new when the used would be cheaper and exactly the same product?

 

[LinkStrikesBack]

I dont get whats the problem? The faster we get rid of second hand market the better. Devs/pubs get the money from every transaction of their product like they should.

Click to shrink...

Woah, uh, hell no? The idea of not allowing second hand sales for all kinds of game is absurd. Imagine if that had been the case with all the consoles of the past, or even Sonys plan for vita and PS3 recently. All of that history just gone, forever.

 

[Mentalist]

All this lawsuits are great, but lets discuss how we can't resell our digital games.
Why can't we transfer ownership of our title to someone else? We paid for our software (or license) often full price, yet we don't get the same rights. Are people ok with that? Are people ok that you pay more for digital then for physical and you essentially get a worse deal?

Click to shrink...

There's the technological hurdle of making sure you (the original purchaser) no longer has access to the product you transferred the license to. How can the system verify you didn't make a backup somewhere and will access your game at a later point
Ironically enough, Stadia, Luna, or another streaming service might be best equipped to allow this functionality, since you never get actual physical access to the 1s and 0s that make up the subject of the copyrighted license you are purchasing.

🆙 that was the short answer

The long answer: as per the WIPO Copyright Treaty, all digital materials are treated essentially as literature, being an expression of written code. Since when distributing the work you don't give away your rights to the IP, this means that a purely digital work cannot be treated as a "product". Copyright is historically based on books, but there you've had 2 elements- the physical product, and the expression of the author's idea that is presented as a certain sequence of words and letters. When you buy a book, you own the paper, but not the pattern of words and letters inside of it (which remains subject to copyright)- you cannot reproduce that pattern for commercial uses, or pass it off as your own. But because this "license to use" the copyrighted material is intrinsically attached to the physical product (the pages of the book), you are able to sell, or give away your license to the copyrighted work when you give away the physical book (you can also photocopy a book before selling the original, which is technically a violation of copyright, btw-depending on the jurisdiction. Also, copying books became easy and feasible long after the copyright regimes were originally established)

When it comes to digital goods, the analogy breaks down, because you remove the physical component that the copyright license would be bundled with. We have actually seen people get around this- the example with people selling PS4s with a copy of "P.T." installed is probably the best example- but it's not particularly practical on a large scale. It would be up to the platform holders to design a system that can keep track of all the licenses moving between user accounts, AND scrubbing their physical media to ensure no one is using a backup for a game they have sold their license to. It'd be a technical challenge, and wouldn't benefit any of the stakeholders (system owners, publishers) other than consumers.

 

[HardRojo]

They can at least benefit digital purchasers with a type of in store credit. Kind of similar to Google Play and SIE points, but a less frugal. But that is asking too much I suppose. lol

Click to shrink...

Nintendo does this with their points. You earn more points for digital purchases than physical purchases.

 

[Kill3r7]

If the platforms were opened up to multiple stores you may get a retailer that would allow that. Highly unlikely, but you never know.

Click to shrink...

It would be up to the publishers, not retailers.

 

[Lashley]

I dont get whats the problem? The faster we get rid of second hand market the better. Devs/pubs get the money from every transaction of their product like they should.

Click to shrink...

 

[Sandersson]

Woah, uh, hell no? The idea of not allowing second hand sales for all kinds of game is absurd. Imagine if that had been the case with all the consoles of the past, or even Sonys plan for vita and PS3 recently. All of that history just gone, forever.

Click to shrink...

Personally I dont really care for older games, but I do get where you are coming from regarding to preservation. I think that aspect just needs some other model that isnt dependant on second hand market. Would be kinda interesting if there is any data on how many people actually want to play old originals.

 

[eraFROMAN]

I've been wanting a sort of license exchange for years; I'd accept it even with caveats if it meant I could "trade" digital games I was done with for other digital games

 

[BadWolf]

There's the technological hurdle of making sure you (the original purchaser) no longer has access to the product you transferred the license to. How can the system verify you didn't make a backup somewhere and will access your game at a later point?

Click to shrink...

Because it won't let your account play it?

Like how sometimes a game goes free by mistake on PSN. At times Sony lets it slide but at other times it revokes the 'purchase' for all the users that took advantage and they are no longer able to run it.

 

[Rickenslacker]

There's the technological hurdle of making sure you (the original purchaser) no longer has access to the product you transferred the license to. How can the system verify you didn't make a backup somewhere and will access your game at a later point?

Click to shrink...

That is the least challenging part, it would be the way it works now, through server checks. Or you could just offline the system permanently to retain it, just like you can circumvent certain checks now, but given how important online connectivity is it's an impractical thing to do and generally good enough to ward off that behaviour.

 

[sibarraz]

If you want to make digital games become NFT then sure

 

[Deleted member 3190]

It would be up to the publishers, not retailers.

Click to shrink...

You're right that publishers would be able to decide if the distributed on such a store, but if the publishers had that much say as to how their apps were distributed on these stores we wouldn't be in the middle of one of the biggest tech lawsuits ever at the moment.

 

[Deleted member 81119]

Don't go there, before you know it we'll have limited numbers of digital games and NFTs

Click to shrink...

Hypothetically, wouldn't an NFT like model be good for this? Instead of a license being tied to a platform holders account that can be shut down at any time, you have a separate digital record of your ownership that can be transferred to other people (sold) and then used to access games from a digital store.

 

[Deleted member 86891]

I dont get whats the problem? The faster we get rid of second hand market the better. Devs/pubs get the money from every transaction of their product like they should.

Click to shrink...

w-what?

 

[ReginaldXIV]

What developer or publisher would support a digital market that allows reselling without also getting compensated for the sale?

Otherwise you get the G2A gray market of stolen keys.

 

[MysteryM]

Just don't get conned into buying an all digital machine and instead save money where you can on physical releases. All digital owners will probably find that game prices on digital stores do my go down as quick as they expect.

 

[Xypher]

Digital used good is a oxymoron. A digital used game is identical to a new digital game. Why would anyone buy new when the used would be cheaper and exactly the same product?

Click to shrink...

Exactly this. A digital license can not be consumed in the same way a physical product can. There are no effects on said good, no matter how much use it got, or how it was treated. You can't actually damage any part of the product. The only way you could have something like a "used" digital market would be if you apply some kind of system that would only allow x amounts of boots, much like Nintendo tried with demos on the 3DS, which only allowed you to launch every demo 30 times.

As long as there is no consumption, a good can not be "used" and as such would always be treated as new, no matter the source of your ownership.

 

[Deleted member 3190]

I've been wanting a sort of license exchange for years; I'd accept it even with caveats if it meant I could "trade" digital games I was done with for other digital games

Click to shrink...

I can't see that happening. The only real way for something like this to work would be if the retailer and publisher were making a "cut" of your sale price.

 

[poklane]

As a consumer I'd obviously love this, I just don't see how it would make sense for publishers and wouldn't cause a huge decrease in brand new full priced sales. If millions of people can resell their digital license on some sort of marketplace the marketplace will be flooded with people selling their games to the point that it will no doubt significantly hurt sales. Even if just 10% of people decide to sell their games we're talking about hundreds of thousands of "used" digital copies within the first week of release for the big releases.

There's the technological hurdle of making sure you (the original purchaser) no longer has access to the product you transferred the license to. How can the system verify you didn't make a backup somewhere and will access your game at a later point?

Click to shrink...

Because the license would be tied to your account and would be removed/revoked once you agree to sell the game? Out of all issues which comes with reselling digital content this definitely wouldn't be one of them.

 

[cw_sasuke]

Can't sell what you don't own.