Bilateralrope

You seem to be saying that what's special about the content behind the second hand activation fee is that the game developer decided to put it behind there. So what happens when they put most of the game behind it ?

Could you cite the specific law or judicial precedent which makes it illegal ?

Early in september there was an announcement that 32 bit applications would soon stop working on Mac OS because of an update. Recently an argument got me thinking about that announcement and thinking: Which Mac games are significant ? I'm curious to hear what you all think counts as a significant Mac game ? Maybe it's only significant to you, maybe it should be significant to a wider group of people.

I don't see how that second hand activation fee can comply with the ruling. This court ruling is that you get to sell your copy of a game because you own that copy. The second hand activation fee is saying that there is part of your copy of the game that you do not own. What makes the content restricted by the second hand activation fee so special that it's exempt from the ruling ? If this ruling is that the digital stores have to allow you to sell individual games, what I see happening is: - Valve will just have you selling games second hand via the Steam Market, which already gives the developer a cut of trading card and in-game item sales that happen on it. So the developers will get a cut of any second hand sales, the only question is the size of their cut. If Valve allows people to arrange sales via other websites*, the Steam market will still dominate due to it being more convenient and having less problems from scammers. - The Epic store might have problems. This is a store that has been promising simple things like a wishlist or shopping cart for over 6 months. A store where the lack of a shopping cart caused customers to trip the stores own anti-fraud system in their first major sale. So I question their ability to comply with the ruling. - GOG might try to an argue for an exception. Their strict policy against DRM means that there is a risk of people unknowingly running a copy of a game from their computer after they have sold it. Sure, Steam's DRM is easily cracked, but that still requires the pirate to take intentional action to crack it, so they should know they are doing something wrong. I'm not sure if GOG could get an "accidental piracy" exception, but I expect them to try. If they get it, things get interesting. *Which only requires Valve to implement a way for you to send your game from your Steam account to another.

Even if the owner of the account gives you permission to access it ? Because giving permission for the new owner to access the account is an implicit part of any sale.

Another game series comes to mind: Marathon. A series often talked about by the Mac enthusiast at my high school, but one I've never played myself. Plus it looks like it can now legally be played for free on Windows.

Ross is assuming a code change to make selling individual games possible. I've not seen any source for the court ordering that. Only for a TOS change to make selling games/accounts allowed.

If you can sell something, then you're also able to sell parts of it if you can seperate parts and find a buyer. The in-game currency of MMOs is one such separable part. As for the other things the gold sellers getting up to being illegal, sure it's illegal. But that hasn't stopped them. Being able to go after the people involved in the trading of the in-game currency for cash discourages buyers, which restricts the entire operation. This ruling, if it survives the appeals, should give you the guarantee you want. Even without requiring a code change.

I'd like to see a source on the claim that the French Court is forcing Valve to make a code change allow people to sell individual games from their Steam account. All the articles I've seen only talk about Valve having to change the Steam TOS, not any of the code. The downsides of second hand sales rely on the assumption that seling individual games is possible. If the ruling is only that the TOS must change, then we will only get to buy and sell Steam (or other store) accounts. So that means you get to choose between selling nothing, or selling your entire Steam library. Just like how you can't sell your cars paintjob without selling the car. If you buy a Steam account, now the games you want to play are split between multiple accounts, which is an annoyance that will discourage buyers. That's the same annoyance that's kept Steam on top of the PC digital distribution market for so long, except it gets bigger for every account a person buys. So I'm thinking that if the ruling is that the TOS must change to make selling games/accounts allowed, but not a code change to make selling individual games possible, it's a good compromise. It sorts out ownership of live services and what happens to your game library when you die. But it doesn't lead to the problems that come with massive numbers of second hand sales because of the annoyances of splitting your library over multiple accounts. The German court ruling means this is going to get appealed until it hits a court that can issue a ruling for all of Europe, unless this consumer group runs out of money first*. Even if this consumer group only targets Valve, other people will use the precedent against other stores. Australia was enough to get Steam to offer refunds worldwide, an European ruling is going to affect everyone. So we do need to watch this. *Does anyone know how they are funded ? If they are government funded, then running out of money seems unlikely. If they take donations, I'm going to seriously think about donating to them.

Another thought comes to mind. If you've played any MMO's, you've probably seen the gold sellers spamming up chat while farming gold with legions of bots. Maybe hacking if the game trusted the clients computer too much. You've probably heard of people having their accounts hacked and all their gear removed. If this ruling means that it's no longer legal to punish people for buying or selling gold, that's going to increase the demand for gold sellers. They are going to get a lot worse. That's the kind of thing that drives away players.

Sure, Valve could do that. Or they could leave Steams code unchanged and selling individual games will remain impossible.

Another tactic developers have used in the past to discourage second hand sales is to make a single player game excessively long by adding lots of filler content. Then, while people don't finish it, they still plan to finish it eventually. So they don't want to sell. Still, I haven't seen any article showing Valve being forced to make any code changes to Steam. So those fears seem overblown.

I don't have time to watch that video right now. Though I have seen some people who are afraid about what will happen to short single player games if they can be sold. The predictions I've seen all rely on the assumption that you'll be able to sell individual games after you've played them. Which is why I pointed out that this ruling only forces a TOS change, not a code change.

Kit Guru Note that this ruling only requires Valve to change the rules around selling games/accounts from "not allowed" to "allowed". It doesn't require any code changes to make selling individual games possible. So, assuming this survives all the inevitable appeals, what effect do you think this ruling will have ? Because I can't see many people willing to sell their entire Steam account. Nor many people wanting to buy them, as that would mean splitting the games they want to play over multiple Steam accounts. Though live service accounts that are only tied to a single game are a different story.

When I think of what I want from Game Dungeon, I want to learn about games that I'm not likely to play myself, but still stick in my mind for some reason. So that leaves two games: E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy. I keep hearing interesting/crazy things about it. I tried the demo and immediately hit two things that really annoy me: Asking players to choose their stats without explaining what those stats do and, even if I knew what I wanted, I'd have to keep hitting randomize until it rolled the stats I wanted. D/Generation: A game that starts off with you as a courier arriving by jetpack. The gameplay is just a bit too clunky for me to enjoy. As for other games, I find Game Dungeon best when Ross finds a game I haven't heard of.

Well it's either that, or we are looking at some world that has been terraformed and the robots got a bit bored waiting for humans to move in.

Ross, you missed detail with your post-apocalypse theory: The robots capable of building the racetracks wouldn't have any trouble cleaning away anything that doesn't fit with the the plans of the track designer. Any mess left by humans (including dead bodies) is easily cleaned up because the mess isn't part of the plans. Farm animals could die off with no humans managing breeding. Or get carted off to a slaughterhouse by farm robots. Or they are another thing that doesn't fit the plan and must be removed. Birds remain because they aren't contained by fences, thus they keep coming back when the robots trying to remove them leave.