EU court rules people can resell digital games
EU court rules people can resell digital games
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.
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Need someone who knows more about EU law to chime in here: does this mean valve et al will be forced to implement a way for users to resell/transfer games to other users?
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?
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
Yep tradable licenses is about the only thing NFTs are actually good for.
but in that case, aren't they just basic crypto keys, but with more (unnecessary) steps?
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?
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.
a in house transfer system
See and that's the issue if you want to sell your game you shouldn't need to do it on steam, it should be a system that continues to exist even if the producer (gamedev) and store go bankrupt, you want some kind of public ledger.
If the storefront goes bankrupt all that public ledger does is give you a dead link unless another storefront picks it up, but if they wanted to do that they could just as easily buy that database from the dying company anyway.
Moreover why would anyone else have an incentive to pay the significant costs associated with hosting a game ownership was on a blockchain, and therefore could be sold independently without them receiving a cut?
The valuable thing about an NFT is not any text (as in: link) you embed in it but the fact that it has been minted by someone to mean something. A publisher minting a game NFT would be saying "this token is a proof of license", same as companies (once upon a time) handed out slips of paper saying "this token is proof of ownership of a share in our company".
Moreover why would anyone else have an incentive to pay the significant costs associated with hosting a game ownership was on a blockchain, and therefore could be sold independently without them receiving a cut?
You could charge for it. It's essentially fancy cloud storage. Also, archive.org.
Archive.org is well, a non profit archive, not a storefront. If you used NFTs and wanted to charge for it, you would need to charge per download. Finally, while a NFT could provide a proof of license, so could any other database.
Um, if the store goes bankrupt then the game ceases to exist. You would at best have a contextless link that pointed to nowhere.
Yes, but crypto keys recorded with an owner in a public ledger, so there's a clear single owner.
Isnt that what a CA is?
Not really, though. NFTs only benefit is to distribute trust/authority. In this case there still needs to be some central authority who will actually honor it and provide the game at the end (either Steam or the game's creator or something else). It is far more energy efficient for that central authority to also track who has what without performing useless work.
Steam or the creator shouldn't be a central authority: If you have a game on steam and want to sell it to someone and they then activate in on epic, that should be possible. There should be zero influence from those parties over what happens with the NFT. It would also be legal, at least over here, to procure an erm backup copy from somewhere if you have such an NFT. And the NFT can live on after the original minter (presumably the publisher) went out of business. Say, GOG or archive.org could offer a service where the gamer pays a small fee and they can download binaries+emulation environment for those abandoned NFTs.
Neither the publisher nor the original store have any legal standing preventing any of this because exhaustion. Which is also why you can get Windows keys for dirt-cheap in e.g. Germany: There's a small cottage industry buying up volume licenses at bankruptcy proceedings and then sell them on, unbundled. Microsoft can do exactly as much about it as Coca-Cola can stop you from selling individual cans from a sixpack.
That's an interesting idea to me, particularly regarding preservation of games of bankrupted companies. I'd still be in favor of a central registrar as opposed to NFTs, just because of the huge inefficiencies and environmental impact of that (essentially useless) computation.
There would need to be some governing authority dictating that companies need to honor the download of games not purchased from them (essentially the government of each country that has this as a law). It would make sense to me that that same government could host a service to keep track of the transactions. Or, more likely, the government just mandates the companies to play nice and exchange purchase data with each other. Sure, in some sense you're letting the wolves run the henhouse, but it also isn't that different from a game company refusing to give you a game you purchased from them. They could do that, but you would take legal action against them. Same thing here.
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
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.
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.
Why should steam get a cut if I sell a game.
Presumably becuse their the ones paying server costs to host the game, let you download it again and again on diffrent devices, and manage all the technical issues with the system of getting it to you.
What blockchain? There are many implementations, there's no reason there has to be excessive "gas" costs. These are solved problems
What blockchain doesn't have high transaction costs once it scales up to large usage? Fundamentally blockchains are about hyper-redundant indestructable storage with expensive costs for writing to that storage to prevent flooding it with garbage. The most mature and sophisticated blockchain that doesn't involve burning down a forest to solve sudokus is the Ethereum network, which is probably the one to point to when we're talking about a large blockchain, and that's one that uses the subcurrency of "gas" to model paying for recording into that ledger.
Are there any blockchains that could handle transaction volumes on the scale of a game-store like Gog or Epic (much less Steam) without putting non-trivial prices on writing the transactions to the ledger?
One example already handling game item NFTs with super low fees https://loopring.org/#/ Another example of super high scalability with extremely low fees https://ripple.com/xrp/
You'd obviously build a bespoke purpose built solution instead of shoehorning it into some random existing crypto network
Why bother with NFTs? every storefront already has a licensing system, the only benefit I could see is being able to move it from storefront to storefront, but they will never go for that. Even then it could be done much more efficiently other ways.
Direct trading of games between individuals. Not locked into one market that could shut down. EA and Steam sell the same game. EA wouldn't let valve have a monopoly on used game trades