Video game lovers who have a certain age remember a past time in which we could buy a game and at the end of reselling it. In this way you could recover some money and the other person could access the same experience at a lower price.
Today we are in a very different situation, and physical games are having less and less presence. A French court wants to make it possible to resell digital games, and that is why it has ruled that Steam users should have the possibility to do so.
They also criticize Valve to keep the account balance when closing it
UFC Que Choisir, a French association that works for consumer rights, has been accusing Valve of violating the rights of its users for years, with clauses that establish that customers do not own the digital games they have purchased.
This ruling also accuses Valve of keeping the balance of a Steam account if the user decides to close it. Valve, meanwhile, is shielded ensuring that what they sell are subscriptions and not game licenses.
They believe that, since Valve does not yet have (serious) competition in this market, this creates an unfair scenario for consumers. Anyway, the company has the possibility to appeal this sentence, so at the moment everything is in the air.
The most interesting thing about this case is that it makes us wonder many things about the current state of the video game market. In the past, video game makers saw (with a bad face) how users could buy and resell the titles we had acquired.
Being a physical medium, you ran the risk that the disc was damaged, that it was no longer guaranteed or that the box and artwork were damaged. That caused the product to lose value and be sold at a lower price.
What would it be like to resell a digital product? In this case, the product cannot deteriorate. In addition, with the passage of time, digital games are going down in price, so if they could be sold they would have to adapt to the price of the moment.
It also makes us wonder if reselling it could include all the DLC’s or the content you bought within the game. We are facing a very interesting case that could mark a before and after in the history of video games. It will be necessary to closely follow the French case and see if this situation extends to more countries.
Source: From
