Quoting: ObsidianBlkAgain, I highly doubt any of this will really happen... But, call me old if you'd like, but I do like physically owning my games.

Hard drive is physical, and can hold a ton of your backed up games, without requiring any individual physical media. Buy the game on GOG, back it up, use it and you are set. No need to sell it on physical disks or cards. They don't offer anything useful if you can download it.

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Looks cool and hopefully will come out on GOG. One major issue I have with Klei though, they practically never respond to bug reports on their forums. So I don't really see them as reliable developers. I posted several in the past, and they never responded.

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Why would you want to go back to physical distribution? It's surely step backwards.

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Quoting: x_wingThe law just says that you should be able to resell, but it doesn't says where. So, I think that is quite probable that you will only be able to resell in a internal market of the store (and the store can get a fee from that resell)

I don't think that would fit the idea of that law. I.e. it's not mandating a middleman. So it means you can sell it however you want, and the store and developers might get nothing from the secondary sales.

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Quoting: SalvatosPrecisely. Whether it’s a copy or an original, you have to part with a book to sell it, which is not the case with digital files; thus the can of worms.

You can part with it - delete it. I see no difference in developers trusting you not to copy it around to others (DRM-free sale) vs trusting you to delete it once you sold it. You can as well make a photocopy of the book and then sell it if you really wanted to. Yet it's not bothering publishers to attach police bots to their books.

I.e. this is not the main issue here. The main issue is simply less sales for developers due to legitimate resales. Not due to someone selling and keeping the copy.

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Quoting: SalvatosOne could argue that you can’t actually sell files. What you have on your drive, whether you got it from Steam or a second-hand reseller, is a copy of the seller’s files. And you can’t resell your files for the same reason.

That's moot. Printed book is also called a copy, except it's a physical one. What defines the right to resell is this first sale doctrine idea. In theory it's not wrong. You should be able to sell what you bought. Trying to restrict that is wrong. The problem is the nature of digital goods. As I said before, if that market can function well, such different nature shouldn't be a blocker for reselling. But if it can't - it's a problem. I wouldn't try to make a prediction how well it could work. It's hard to tell.

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This whole "license" thing is messed up. What you are buying are files. Something that contains digital goods. Attempts to frame it as "licensing" are just dumb methods to reduce user's rights.

However, the problem is in the nature of digital goods themselves. Once you have the result, it costs practically nothing to reproduce it. Question is, how to make this whole model sustainable. I.e. developers make a game, and they need to have certain number of sales to make profit. If this idea of reselling will make it a lot worse for them - they might go bust altogether. May be it won't though. It's up to the user, whether they'll prefer to support those developers, or buy a "used" copy (even though there is no idea of "used" in digital sense).

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Quoting: g000hFor those thinking this will be a good thing for DRM-Free Gaming: I think the opposite - This will push all new commercial games to become purely rental titles, i.e. You can download the game for free, but you won't be able to play it without a subscription.

I can see some publishers reacting to this, by only selling games where you can't download actual games (i.e. Stadia). Essentially DRM on steroids. And this really "fixes" their worries about illegal reselling part. Transferring something like Stadia game access is trivial and the original user loses access as soon as it's transferred.

However I don't think it fixes their worries about total number of sales going down. Imagine someone playing a game, and then selling it to others, who are buying from such people instead of the store directly. The bottom line would be less sales for the store and developers.

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Hm, according to this. EU already allowed it before. So what's new in this ruling?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine#Application_to_digital_copies [External Link]

In Europe, the European Court of Justice ruled, on July 3, 2012, that it is indeed permissible to resell software licenses even if the digital good has been downloaded directly from the Internet, and that the first sale doctrine applied whenever software was originally sold to a customer for an unlimited amount of time, as such sale involves a transfer of ownership, thus prohibiting any software maker from preventing the resale of their software by any of their legitimate owners.[5][6][7] The court requires that the previous owner must no longer be able to use the licensed software after the resale, but finds that the practical difficulties in enforcing this clause should not be an obstacle to authorizing resale, as they are also present for software which can be installed from physical supports, where the first-sale doctrine is in force.[8][9] The ruling applies to the European Union, but could indirectly find its way to North America; moreover the situation could entice publishers to offer platforms for a secondary market.

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Interesting. Basically, confirmation that first sale doctrine should apply to digital goods as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine [External Link]

However not sure if there is a major consensus that it's a good idea.

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