I’m not talking about physical case/disc/cartridge based games. But moreso, digital games. It would be a solution for gamers that fret about backlogs and knowing completely that they’re never going to play the games that they have. That they’ve acquired from impulse, FOMO and other issues. May have been gifted a game that they liked for only a little while and may have nobody at all to play with for years.

I’ve learned that over in the EU, people can actually re-sell their games on Steam. I don’t truly see that happening in America, though there’s some small hope. But I want to take the idea a little step further.

Instead of just simply re-selling games, you could re-gift them as a way of recycling. Because I find that simply deleting them “permanently” (you can just revive a game to your library on Steam) is wasteful. You know you’re not going to play it again, you know you’ve wasted however much money on it only to see it deleted to not be touched again.

Valve, publishers and the developers have already made their money and I know it’d be an uphill fight in America’s case to try and re-sell. Because they’d just bring up the refund policy and it can be fair, at times, except for the 2 week time limit.

But I don’t see a huge of a loss in re-gifting. Sure, I can see the argument of people gifting back so much, it defeats the purpose of buying the game again. I never said that there wouldn’t be some regulatory practice in place to prevent such abuse.

That matter would be up to Valve/Publishers/Developers to agree on. My idea of regulating it would be that you’re allowed to gift X amount of games for Y amount of time. That and you have to fill out a form per gift as to why you’re gifting this game and you’re placed on some cooldown timer from buying said game again. Just a concept idea.

There are tons of games that I do not play anymore and would love to see them go into the hands of other gamers that would play them. If the Publishers, Developers or even Valve think that they need to have some monetary value into this, fine, then users can at least pay a very low sum amount of money to be able to gift the game. Something no more than $1 at the least.

  • @FelixCressEnglish
    12•1 day ago

    https://www.eurogamer.net/eu-rules-publishers-cannot-stop-you-reselling-your-downloaded-games#comments

    The Court said the exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by the license is “exhausted on its first sale”.

    The ruling means that gamers in European Union member states are free to sell their downloaded games, whether they’re from Steam, Origin or another digital platform - no matter what End User License Agreement has been signed.

    The ruling continues: “Therefore, even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.”

    And then

    https://game8.co/articles/latest/steam-gog-and-others-must-allow-reselling-of-downloaded-games-in-eu

    • VictoriaEnglish
      1•23 hours ago

      so this is about selling your steam account, since you can’t sell individual keys?

      • @FelixCressEnglish
        5•23 hours ago

        Pass, no idea. There appears to be a European Court of Justice ruling saying that you are entitled to sell individual pieces of software and Steam cannot stop you from doing so, ie their EULA is invalid in this regard.

        But I am not aware about any legislation which would force them to create a mechanism for you to do so. I have only googled the entire thing out of curiosity.

        I guess it is easier with GoG games, you can just copy them to someone else’s pc, delete from your machine and it is sorted, someone else can use them.