Retailers threaten to ban Steam games!

[Scoobes]

nordlead said:

Scoobes said:

I never said it was logical, lol.

It's an issue with the laws for protecting copyright holders. Basically, the reason you're allowed to sell your content is because the value decreases with use (like a car for instance). With digital download, as their is no decrease in value due to the user; it remains identical from the day you purchased it. Due to this, a digital resale becomes an issue for content holders as their is no distinct advantage to buying something new, the quality of the digital product remains constant and therefore, for the content provider, is the equivalent of piracy. 

Even selling second hand games has the disadvantage that the disk is worn, the case may be damaged, manual missing, etc.

You can however, sell an entire account because when you buy a game across Steam, that is technically what you own... yeah, the laws are fuzzy.

Anyway, I never said I supported DRM as a whole. I said I support a service (that has DRM) when there are much greater advantages to the end user that outweigh the negatives. The only service that has done this (in games) is Steam. The positives of Steam as a service include physical damge of disks becomes a non-issue, auto-patching, cross-platform play, cross-platform ownership, saved game backups, community features (acheivements, chat, profiles etc.) and being playable on multiple hardware units no matter where you are. If I have to stay with family for a few months and have to use a seperate PC, I don't need to take my games with me, just my account details.

Which other services (with DRM) offer all of this? As far as I'm aware, none of them (including the EA online thing). Valve and Steam have fans because the service is good. It wasn't all plain sailing as I'm sure you know. When Steam was first launched it was a terrible service, but people don't mind anymore because it's greatly improved over the years. You must see that right?

the bold is so totally not true and a lie that content creators feed to consumers to try and convince them that resale is as bad as piracy . The reason you are allowed to sell your property is because it is yours. Plain and simple. These publishers are trying to restrict what you are buying from a copy of the game to a liscense to use the game. This is what they are doing.

Content creators do have a point though.

The laws were written when everything was a physical product, and everything degraded over time unless kept in pristine conditions. With digital download, nothing degrades and it is always in the same condition. A resale of a digital download could have major and adverse effects to the pricing of a product. Why pay full price when person X is selling for half the price for exactly the same game and quality?

With physical disks it's less of an issue, but content creators can still suffer (and boy do they complain) from low pricing of second-hand games. The problem would be heavily exacerbated in the digital download market.

Either way, its' an issue that needs to be sorted.