A steam key is the receipt that you paid for the game. It is ridiculous that companies get to skirt laws by saying, “It’s on a computer.”
Imagine you buy a car. Years later you go to resell it for less and the manufacture claims you can’t because the sales receipt that proves you are the legitimate owner is a “Steam Cars Inc key” and therefore all existing laws do not apply.
Yeah that’s not what they’re preventing. It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys, i.e. the developer, from generating a lot of Steam keys and then selling them on their own site at a discount, which is basically leeching off of the Steam infrastructure & ecosystem while sidestepping the storefront. Which is fine as long as they don’t undercut.
The EULA for any software you’ve ever paid for is what forbids resale.
Again that is a separate issue from the no undercutting clause. Prohibition of resale is ubiquitous in the software world because for decades the ploy has been to sell you a license, not an actual product.
Of course I’d love that to change but it’s a core precept of how digital ownership works and has worked for most of it’s existence. Steam is not the main force behind that.
Steam started it! You must be too young to remember the uproar in the gaming community about HL2 being the first Steam game and requiring Internet authentication to play with the ridiculous restriction of not being allowed to resell the game you bought at the store. It was years later before they eased selling restrictions but still never to the amount that consumers enjoyed before Steam existed. Gabe was the original techbro: “Hey I know it’s illegal but what if we do it anyway. Then we use the profits to pay the lawyers to make it legal.” It’s why France sued Valve to require them to follow the laws that exist for everything else.
https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/video-games-europe-welcomes-french-supreme-court-decision-on-the-resale-of-digital-video-games/
Steam was like Walmart moving into a new territory- with the added consumer hostility of adding restrictions to purchases that consumers used to enjoy. It was because of Steam’s success that other businesses realized that consumers would take abuse if it meant they could get their entertainment conveniently.
You’re conflating DRM with software licensing. DRM is digital enforcement of license terms. Steam was by no means the first form of DRM, but it is a DRM platform (though there are some DRM-free titles).
I am not too young to remember Steam being a highly controversial topic because it was basically launched as the DRM for Half-Life 2. The backlash against the normalization of DRM led to the creation of Good Old Games, still the premiere DRM-free vendor on the market.
However, software licenses have been in use since the 70s. The practice of selling actual copies of code as opposed to licenses to use the code was already rare by the 90s. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell or copy it, at least for most commercial products. Most people just never read the very long terms of usage.
While there was a game that had online authentication before Steam, Steam popularized it to make it industry standard.
Copy protection is very different than online authentication that restricts your ownership rights.
. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell
Absolutely untrue! You were denied the right to copy the software. If you bought a CD, you absolutely had the right to resell it.
2 is false. It only applies to steam keys.
A steam key is the receipt that you paid for the game. It is ridiculous that companies get to skirt laws by saying, “It’s on a computer.”
Imagine you buy a car. Years later you go to resell it for less and the manufacture claims you can’t because the sales receipt that proves you are the legitimate owner is a “Steam Cars Inc key” and therefore all existing laws do not apply.
Yeah that’s not what they’re preventing. It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys, i.e. the developer, from generating a lot of Steam keys and then selling them on their own site at a discount, which is basically leeching off of the Steam infrastructure & ecosystem while sidestepping the storefront. Which is fine as long as they don’t undercut.
The EULA for any software you’ve ever paid for is what forbids resale.
If it was only about developers then consumers could have the right to resell their game at whatever price they wanted.
EU countries wouldn’t have to sue Steam for consumer rights:
https://blog.igv.com/steam-freedom-equality-and-game-resale-steam-vs-france/
Again that is a separate issue from the no undercutting clause. Prohibition of resale is ubiquitous in the software world because for decades the ploy has been to sell you a license, not an actual product.
Of course I’d love that to change but it’s a core precept of how digital ownership works and has worked for most of it’s existence. Steam is not the main force behind that.
Steam started it! You must be too young to remember the uproar in the gaming community about HL2 being the first Steam game and requiring Internet authentication to play with the ridiculous restriction of not being allowed to resell the game you bought at the store. It was years later before they eased selling restrictions but still never to the amount that consumers enjoyed before Steam existed. Gabe was the original techbro: “Hey I know it’s illegal but what if we do it anyway. Then we use the profits to pay the lawyers to make it legal.” It’s why France sued Valve to require them to follow the laws that exist for everything else. https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/video-games-europe-welcomes-french-supreme-court-decision-on-the-resale-of-digital-video-games/
Steam was like Walmart moving into a new territory- with the added consumer hostility of adding restrictions to purchases that consumers used to enjoy. It was because of Steam’s success that other businesses realized that consumers would take abuse if it meant they could get their entertainment conveniently.
You’re conflating DRM with software licensing. DRM is digital enforcement of license terms. Steam was by no means the first form of DRM, but it is a DRM platform (though there are some DRM-free titles).
I am not too young to remember Steam being a highly controversial topic because it was basically launched as the DRM for Half-Life 2. The backlash against the normalization of DRM led to the creation of Good Old Games, still the premiere DRM-free vendor on the market.
However, software licenses have been in use since the 70s. The practice of selling actual copies of code as opposed to licenses to use the code was already rare by the 90s. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell or copy it, at least for most commercial products. Most people just never read the very long terms of usage.
While there was a game that had online authentication before Steam, Steam popularized it to make it industry standard.
Copy protection is very different than online authentication that restricts your ownership rights.
Absolutely untrue! You were denied the right to copy the software. If you bought a CD, you absolutely had the right to resell it.