Valve is convicted in France for banning the resale of dematerialized games | Hacker News Reader

Valve is convicted in France for banning the resale of dematerialized games

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36 pointsalexsb929 comments

Hot take: the likely response from AAA publishers will be "that's OK, we don't sell games anymore just LIVE SERVICES"

Yeah I'm worried this will actually be worse for indie developers than the big gaming publishers who can afford always-on servers and subscription based models

They basically already do, considering most new console games refuse to start without a working internet connection.

I had a service outage from my ISP the other day, so I figured I'd play some offline AC:Odyssey. Imagine my surprise when it refused to launch (from the disc, no less) without a connection.

not most games, most games by Ubisoft, and probably EA

Better than previous case where German court decided games are "works of art", thus licensed not sold :/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/10/german-court-rul... It was a BS ruling, basically saying if you bundle a song and pretty graphic in your program its no longer "just" software and rule of exhaustion doesnt apply.

Doesn't this have implications for any industry that sells a digital product? Games, music, movies/tv, software, etc?

It should. Digital asset rights should be universal regardless of digital asset. We'll see how the courts respond.

Well, Valve will either have to make a specific part of the store for re-selling games in France, or roll it out to all customers.

I think they'll roll it out to just France.

It's also frustrating when the legal system works so slow that competitors like Epic, Origin, et al. don't have to abide by this ruling yet.

Valve may not be able to confine any such thing to France.

One article I read said France is fighting the issue in a way under EU laws that the rest of the EU should be able to adopt the judgment quickly thereafter, though it may take a few more court cases to do it, as it partly depends on whether Valve appeals the case enough. (The semi-ironic risk versus reward of the appeals process pushing it closer to EU courts, versus overturning France's decision here.)

I'm still somewhat upset that the GDPR writers knew digital asset rights would be the "next fight" after a lot of the privacy concerns were addressed but explicitly kicked the can on it (a brief like half paragraph about how they considered it but ignored it). This fight maybe increases the likelihood we could see some future GDPR-like bill for digital assets rights.

Such an EU-wide measure might be real hope that, like the GDPR, it would apply quickly to other competitors and generally worldwide since the EU market is big enough (and covers its citizens even when residing in non-EU nation states) that it would be too much work to run two systems.

(Aside: my personal fascination is how long it may take us to start fighting over digital asset inheritance laws, given that most terms of service agreements imply that services do not survive their owner.)

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