Gabagoolzoo

I didn’t say you should or should not be able to do anything, I’m just talking about what effects such law might have.

… Jfc, I didn’t make any kind of moral argument about ownership at all. At no point did I ever say you should or should not be able to sell the things that you own. Maybe read what I fucking said.

Lol, this website is so fucking shit. Sorry for trying to discuss things on a discussion forum.

Why? What exactly would keep a second hand digital games market afloat? Physical games have collectability. You might pay a little extra to buy new, so you know the physical goods are in pristine condition. Digital goods have no inherent value. You can show them off on your Steam account and that’s about it.

People would buy the keys at initial lauch, finish the game and then sell the keys. Next group buys those keys for cheap, finish the game and then sells for even less. This cycle continues in a race to the bottom. Unlike physical media where it could get lost, destroyed, etc. those keys NEVER go away. Prices will go down infinitely. There is absolutely no scarcity whatsoever.

Companies are only able to sell a certain amount of keys total before the third market economy kicks off and everyone just uses that. Companies then have to maintain price parity with the third market and sell their games at perpetually low prices because there is NO downside to buying used in a digital market. Aint no way in hell a company is sinking money into big-budget single-player games if they have to sell the game for $5 a month after release. They would need to shift towards making more replayable games to incentivise people to hang on to their copies.

Please, tell me where I am wrong.

One is a physical collectable and the other is not. It’s like comparing an NFT to a Funko pop, there is a reason the latter never took off. If you think digital goods have value as collectables, then surely you also think NFTs have value as collectables? (The current NFT market would state otherwise…)

Being able to resell digital games would completely fuck single player games. I imagine a handful of licenses would get sold at launch and then redistributed between people endlessly, until sales just bottom out completely when you can get a second-hand key for pennies. There would probably be a big shift towards games with lots of replay value like multiplayer or roguelikes.

Units sold is really only useful if comparing similar products. You wouldn’t compare how many yachts are sold in a year vs how many toothpicks or sticks of gum, by the same logic it makes no sense to compare a $500 gaming console to a $2 indie game either. Steam sells a lot of different products, I mean how would you measure F2P games which are not even sold by unit in the first place? How about DLCs? Software licenses?

And I would argue the info is useless anyway. All the list does is give you rough idea on what’s making money on Steam, there are no specifics given. No one is using this data for anything serious.

What other metric would you use to measure “top sellers”, flat units sold? $10 indies and games on sale would probably dominate that list. Seems the most sense to base it off of revenue.

…what isn’t clear about it, Steam top sellers list has always been total revenue of everything sold on Steam. Even F2P games with microtransactions are counted.