I'm a hoarder, I buy games that i will never play just because there are 5 of 'em in a dollar bundle... i don't care about reselling :P
Also, I don't buy games over $10 except for a few exceptions, so the amount of money I'd get back by reselling would be next to zero anyway.
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No. The only reason steam has as big of sales as it does, is because you cannot resell your games. If they added reselling, they would have to increase the original prices to compensate, which means no more crazy bi-yearly sales.
Besides, games are not even all that expensive on the PC anymore unless you want to buy them at, or shortly after, launch. Most people these days have more games than they have time to play, so its really not necessary.
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So having the option to purchase game at a lower price points second-hand is bad because it would prevent purchasing games at a lower price points from the main retailer? Wot?
Last I checked, the console market wasn't suffering even with those dastardly used games traders doing their damndest to undermine it.
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+1 undercut undercut undercut, my game didn't sell in 20 seconds undercut again.
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Personally, I don't like the idea of selling/trading games in the library. It gives hackers more of an incentive to hack Steam accounts so they can sell/trade away the games for profit. How does Steam support know if you actually decided to sell every game you had on steam because you needed money for a mortgage payment or if a hacker sold everything? It's improbable but possible. And Steam Guard isn't perfect; one day, some hacker will find a way around it and people will be thanking whatever deity they follow that they only lost a few items from their inventory instead of their 1000+ games library.
Call it a fear of mine...:/
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But if they let you trade games from your library, then people could send money straight to paypal....
Or they could use the money gained from selling the entire library as wallet, buy copies of some AAA game that's new, and sell the gift copies.
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This! i think you are totally right! maybe the way to avoid this is to make an annoying way to trade the games maybe with support and tons of questions about your identity so they can verify if its really you... but would be a pain in the ass for them and for us...
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They'd have to start tracking all game keys otherwise you could buy a humble bundle and make a profit off the games. I really see no reason for them to add this kind of feature. It would be nice if they had a return period like origin recently added (although once again, they would have to track keys) but allowing people to sell back digital games at any time just doesn't make much financial sense.
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I think its obvious something like this would never, ever, be available to purchases outside steam store(even if you bought a steam key)
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Yeah games from outside Steam are marked as "free" in your Steam account. (click on Store Transactions)
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The ones added via key are listed as "Retail" not "Free" unless you are talking about the ones activated from inventory. ( IE something that was trade-able via steam's chat/trading system ) Then it would be listed as "Gift/Guest Pass".
The items that are listed as free on steam ( Games/DLC/betas/ect ) show up as "Complimentary". Though in some rare instances some games that are part of a pack will be listed as such. ( The pack that has Half-Life 1 + its expansions is an example of such rare instances where a game bought is listed as "Complimentary". )
Also I noticed a lot of people talking about how it would be if they allowed it, but ignoring the fact that if they did such a thing they would also be adding other things for labeling and keeping track of said things. I seriously doubt they would just slap something like that on with no other changes.
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They are quite clearly marked as "free" here. They are marked as retail/complimentary under the license section. I did quite clearly state in my post that it says "free" in the Store Transactions section for keys you redeem :-p
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I'm pretty sure bundle keys already have some kind of identifier built into.
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the german's consumer advice center is working on it. (selling/sharing games like you can do with console games aka how sony owned microsoft)
their chances to win at the court here in germany are pretty good - and the best: origin and other platforms must follow the outcome.
gaben's reaction was priceless: "oh yeah, those guys trying to make accounts transferable or something like that..."
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It was already passed in EU?
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/03/crikey-eu-rules-you-can-resell-downloaded-games/
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That is just evil. Play all the games and sell them again.
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That's crazy talk. Games are meant to be collected. Maybe not in the sense that you gotta catch 'em all, but definitely in a sense that they are not disposables.
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An entirely subjective viewpoint. Not only from person to person, but also from game to game on top of that. Take, for instance, Rage. It entertained me when I played it and I would have easily spent a weekend with it. But it's hardly a masterpiece and in my estimation wouldn't be worth keeping.
There's enough room for disposable entertainment in the video game medium, as there is in any other.
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gamestop does but only give you a dollar instore credit for most games. Only games that get at least $20 or more are the "wanted" games I think they call it.
I remember trading all the leftover games I didn't want that my uncle passed on to me when I was young, and I had about 90 games but only got like $50 credit. I entered with about 90 games and left with only 5.. At least those games are good though including spiderman 2 lol
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No lol just the ones I didn't like. I got a bunch of them like he had so many games I don't think he even played them much and all were racing games and duplicates, plus I had no room for all those games and wanted ones that I would play including spiderman 2. These are ps2 games by the way and this was back when ps3 wasn't made yet
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i disagree with this system as it encourages a lack of money flow through the game economy... when that happens you end up having to spend $128 on Mass Effect 3 special edition ($108 normal) and do you really want prices to get gouged the same way they do over here in AUS/NZ region?
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Yup. Devs would sell their games at a higher price if they could be re-sold at a lower price later.
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both of you seemed to miss my point... lack of money flow causes inflation, its not so much the devs put the price up as the region gets a general increase in cost to keep the same money flowing through a specific market... I have yet to see a AAA game cost $60 within the first 6 months of release including pre-owned from a retail store (counting from any other source such as Ebay is stupid because it doesn't have region effects it only has a shipping cost and that's it)...
oh and you are lucky to get a $60 new release game... try $99 for CoD, $98 Battlefield, $108 Mass Effect, $70 Dark Souls (and that isn't even AAA), $89 Medal of Honor, $97 Tomb Raider the list goes on and none of these are even special edition prices...
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If this were to happen, imagine the bickering over CV...
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That would be called a refund, not selling. The OP says "sell for a profit." You're selling it to users, not to Valve. That would be an even worse system.
Yes, there's technically no such thing as a used digital game, but it's a license you owned and used, then passed on to someone else and no longer retain the access to, just like traditional used physical games.
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I get what you're saying, but at the same time look at the marketplace as it is now. Every time a user sells a card or something like that, Valve takes a cut. A small cut, but still a cut. It would no doubt be the same for re-selling licenses.
There's also ways to make re-sellable licenses work where it would benefit everyone.
-Allow the developer to decide if its allowed or not.
-Have dates for when the game is available to be resold.
-Eliminate "extras" from a resold license. IE If a game has card drops, a re-sold license cannot receive card drops.
-Resellable games would also entice developers to offer more to those people that choose to buy the game when its at its most popular/release.
-Instead of free-for-all market where people can undercut to the lowest price, have a minimum sale price, meaning it cannot be sold for less than ___. This retains profit margins for all sides. If you want to sell a particular used game, it gets a set price and you sell based on where in the queue you land. If there's 5000 people trying to sell that particular license, you have to wait until its your turn. This would be controversial I imagine, but its one way that they could set the market.
There's ways a resale market can work with digital goods. The problem is that it's not really been tried yet on a large scale bar a few oddity websites that allow you to resell MP3s and ebooks. It'd be an interesting experiment though.
Another method could be the allowing the trade of licenses, but charge a small fee per license trade. This would also be controversial, but if it was a very small amount, it could be a success.
Eventually there will be more flexibility with digital goods. Its still a very new revenue stream. MP3s being sold is still only 10-15 years old.
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As someone already said, the amazing deals steam offers are what you get instead of selling games.
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That's a nice idea and everything, but then Valve's profit would drop by a huge margin, meaning an end to the sales we get (and perhaps an end to Steam in a rather short order). The re-sale of games we have completed means that it would be entirely possible for them to stop getting sales away from games released in the past few weeks.
As nice of a dream as it is, this kind of thing would choke out most businesses in a very short order. The market has changed, and a sudden reversion to older ways where you didn't have to register games would be kinda like kicking out half the foundation of a huge tree, it simply wouldn't be able to support its own weight any more and come crashing down. That's just not a good thing for anyone concerned. Plus, as frustrating as it was to get used to mandatory online distribution platforms for certain games, they are perhaps one of the better DRMs (though could use more support for offline play).
They actually toyed with this idea for a while but I think they found it wasn't sustainable. Even with a little slice of the player-to-player sales going back to the developers and an even smaller slice going to Valve, it would still be a losing move, from a business and sustainability standpoint.
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I think Steam should offer resale options to developers. Basically, giving the developer the option to allow current owners of the game to gift (not sell) the game licence to another party. There would be a fee involved with this transfer, paid by the either the current game owner (in the case of gifting away) or the recipient (in the case of a 'sale') of which nothing goes to the seller of the game - it's split between Steam (small fee similar to market fees), Developer and possibly charities if the developer chooses to.
This would be an AWESOME idea, and I would fully support this. It would also allow people to give away games they're no longer playing on SteamGifts!
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No developer in their right mind would support the re-selling of their games lol.
Plus we don't actually own the games on Steam, we buy subscriptions to play the game on our account. It would change everything about the Steam subscriber agreement (which up until now, has worked just fine).
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Some indie developers just might. And if there's enough of them taking up the options, it may cause some pressure for larger developers to do the same.
Also, from a lower post, replayability is key. If Minecraft was on Steam, I wouldn't consider trading it away - it's something I intend to keep for the forseeable future as it has almost unlimited replayability. Resale would allow those games without replayability from cluttering up people's libraries and never being played, and would encourage developers to add more replay value so customers would actually want to keep them after they'd 'won' the game.
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I understand what you're saying, but not every game is going to have replay value. With no replay value, the price of these games is going to drop fast and profits for companies are going to quickly disappear. In a matter of weeks the game will be cheap as chips. There's just no incentive for companies to allow re-sell of their digital games.
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Oh Christ, everyone's rushing to defend Valve's profit line, and I suspect economic illiteracy among the populace. Tell me, why are the steam store discounts inherently better than low-cost used licenses? Why is a publisher holding a monopoly on a particular product's sales a good thing?
Because where I'm standing, the expectations of people here are just... weird. Sale prices going up through the roof? How? The market ultimately determines the price, not the supplier. The publishers can't get away with much more than $50 or $60 at launch, or they would do so already. And while yes, if people started trading their copies that would provide competition to the publisher for its own product, that's just an incentive for the publisher to...
a) Match the price points or even undercut what the used games are going for. Remember, the publisher has the only original legitimate supply of their own product. And it's an infinite one to boot. They can't run into shortage problems that used sellers would face if they set their prices too low. Prices remained constant in the console market because console games were/are still sold on physical discs in physical shops with all the limitations thereof. The PC market doesn't have those issues.
and even if this didn't work...
b) Release games that people will -want- to keep instead of trade off. This should be self-evident. They can fight against used games for market share of their own product by working to prevent the incentives for a used-games market to exist in the first place.
Seriously, monopolies breed inefficiency, stifle innovation, and provide lower quality products than would otherwise be possible. This is an observable law of nature. This applies to the monopolies publishers currently have on providing products based on their IPs. That consumers don't have basic property rights over what is their property (yes, the game may not be 'yours' per se, but you definitely own the -license-) such as the ability to gift or resell is downright immoral, and hurts consumers in the long run. For these reasons and more, I would whole-heartedly welcome the ability to trade my digital games.
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Match the price points or even undercut what the used games are going for.
This is ridiculously risky. With no control over how cheap people will sell their games for, companies could well end up losing more money than they make. It's not a question of supply, it's a question of cost. An infinite supply of their product exists, but they have costs to cover and profits to make.
Release games that people will -want- to keep instead of trade off.
Absolutely genius. Valve should hire you and your economic literacy.
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Games with less replay value (regardless of core quality) would be the first to crash down to below £1, while still requiring sizeable downloads sported by the Valve servers and offering next to nothing in recompense.
I mean, sure, Valve COULD allow the resale of products, but then they would likely have to make up for it elsewhere. If not in prices more akin to retail stores, then in something potentially worse, like a subscription fee for surcharge for accessing/downloading the games from their servers, which would be a terrible thing, but as always, businesses speak in money-
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But if the power to determine the price were given back to the market in this case where infinitely resellable and reusable licenses are concerned, wouldn't it create a landslide price-war where the products sink towards a price-point of nothing at a landslide rate? Sure, Steam would still have an infinite supply of licenses to give, but not all gamers are impulse buyers who grab games when they are freshly released. Consider the current number of licenses per-game that are floating around, and imagine how this appears to any business worth its salt if you told them all those licenses could then exchange hands with little to no profit to the hosting company? That is practically taking your own profit margin and donating it to those who created the games (and to the users who previously owned the license, in the case that the exchange would be handled like that). This goes directly against their interests, with the added quirk of not lessening the costs of hosting the product.
I don't think it's a monopoly to prevent resale of digital licenses, but then again that opinion may be influenced by the fact that I purchase primarily from Steam, where the games I purchase are typically a damn sight cheaper than being purchased by generic street retailers, and often cheaper than online hard-copy or even key retailers. Sure, they could undercut whatever the users are offering in resale, assuming they don't just offer games they don't like for next to nothing in the ensuing price collapse, or they could return to standard business practices and charge closer to half-a-hundred per fresh game.
This is pretty much a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". It's a nice idea but really, I actually enjoy Valve's service provision enough that I actually want to defend their interests too. I can't think of a way that would reasonably allow resale without them literally offering up a huge slice of their own previous proceeds as sacrifice. While I agree that the basic reduction of rights to consumers is one hell of an issue that could use a lot of re-thinking, I also think that the market has changed a lot too, so exactly what is fair for all concerned needs to be re-examined. It's a tricky subject, because exposure also changes your perception of a system and what should be allowable.
Perhaps a simple separation of process for hard-copy and digital copies could be that little spark for competition? I mean, requiring hard copies to have their keys permanently registered and locked to an account, when the customer can simply purchase a digital key and make a manual backup (in an age where DVD burners are cheap and easy to find/use, no less) is a bit odd. I might remark more on the console scene here but I really have no familiarity with it any more, nor its practices with licenses and ownership.
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Yes, even if Valve would take a 30% cut off the used game sales. You own a license, you should be entitled to sell/give it to somebody else.
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The Steam Sales do give the players chances to get games for way lower than the average price. But as soon as that happens. BAM, steam has server issues and eventually gets back up. It would only allow players to sell maybe 30% 40% under the original price from when they bought it. People would bum rush these deals probably increasing profits a lot more as little kids would want to take advantage of this especially as they have no jobs or money and mostly rely on their parents.
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They tend to be the ones trying to trade their hard-earned TF2 hats for Skyrim.
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But... Why would this be bad? (Disclaimer: All these numbers are made up for the sake of my argument) The publisher agrees on a 75 percent off sale for their 10 dollar game. Person A buys a copy at 2.50 with the intent to trade for 2 keys, and the dev gets 70 percent with the rest going to Steam (1.75 profit). That's the last penny the dev sees.
With game reselling, now Person A puts the game on the market at 3.00 instead of asking for 2 keys. If the same percentage is used, the dev gets 10 percent from this sale. Now they made 2.05 from that single copy instead of 1.75. Person B gets the game for cheaper, and, if the copy would have been traded for keys, Valve still gets more money out of it, too.
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I personally would love to see something like this implemented. With that said, there needs to be some way to make new games seem like a better option than the used games, so that developers can still make the normal amount of profit as well as the sides from used games. Part of me thinks season passes could play into this, but I'm almost completely against the whole season pass thing.
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Good luck for indie games trying to making a profit. This would be a greater incentive for AAA developers like EA to not release games on Steam as well. Steam/Amazon/GMG/Gamersgate/Humble/etc deals are good enough for me.
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Maybe a System where you could sell them on the market would work. If steam got a percent of the profit they might like the idea. It may decrease the amount of sales they make though.
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I think it'd be cool if steam added a system where your games your don't play anymore could be sold for a profit. Take a game you finished and don't plan on playing anymore like... Portal. Sell it less than it currently is, but some of the profits still goes toward the developers instead of you getting all the money. I just want to see what peoples opinion are on this. I think it'd be really cool.
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