Reply With QuoteI don't think Steam will let you transfer ownership.
Can you sell the box and then "gift" the license to the buyer?
I can't find any answer to this. I bought E:TW from amazon, have not enjoyed it and have sold it through their marketplace thing. I've removed local content from steam, but the game was activated on-line with my steam account (I had to, otherwise I couldn't play it).
Someone tell me what I need to do so the person who buys the disk from me can play it.
Ta
I don't think Steam will let you transfer ownership.
Can you sell the box and then "gift" the license to the buyer?
If you want to sell Steam games, then create a new Steam account every time you buy a game from them. Then you can sell the email/password combination. Heh.
Yeah, I don't think you can remove a game from your steam account. Did you already sell the game without checking on that first?
I did. maybe the big sign saying "sell yours here!" on the amazon order page was why I did that.
There is no mention at amazon that the game is not resellable, in fact they encourage it.
It's not a steam game, I didn't buy it from them. i bought it from amazon.
So basically any agme thats associated with steam, regardless where bought is non sellable?
Yeah that sounds about right to me. Still E:TW is kinda unique in that it was released as a retail game(to get the bigger number of sales) but used steam as it's DRM, which then ties the retail bought game into teh interweb and steam account. no resale. It will end up a slightly messy experiment probably.
I'm pretty sure that's not legal. Not in the Uk anyway.
Fuck it, I'm mailing it. I had no idea that this game was exempt from normal Uk consumer law. Let amazon argue it with me. They even ASKED me if I wanted to sell it.
I won't buy another game that requires steam in a hurry.
Yep, you're SOL. Steam games, like every other piece of downloadable content in the world like itunes music, etc, cannot be resold.
If you mail it you're just screwing the buyer. That's not very nice.
Yeah, that's rotten. You should be able to sell games that you completely give up ownership rights to (i.e. uninstall and sell all install materials, manuals, etc.).
I could see if you bought it off Steam and had to click a Terms of Service before purchasing, but after the fact? That sucks.
I suppose I better contact the buyer. and say they arent getting it.
I'm going to demand a refund from amazon.
This sucks big time.
Yeah, fuck that poor bastard who bought it from you! You could easily just communicate the problem with them, but nope - mail it anyway!Originally Posted by cliffski
All of this makes me glad that when given the choice I game on the 360. Sell away!
I was pretty mad when Stardock released their gaming Bill of Rights and didn't include the ability to sell the game. I understand why from a publisher's standpoint, but fuck it, I'm a gamer. I want to sell games so I can buy new games. And I want to buy used games. And when I can't, I will sometimes skip over that game.
I felt like such a chump when I finished Bioshock a week after I got it and couldn't sell it off because I bought it on Steam.
well hey. Amazon, on the phone assure me that I can sell the game and it will work with someone else's steam account. Do they know something we all don't or are they clueless?
Gah!
Maybe steam allow a dozen or so reinstalls in different accounts?
I really doubt it. You could test it yourself by opening a new steam account and trying to reinstall to that account.
The #1 reason I avoid digital distribution like a plague whenever possible.
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rezaf
They're clueless, it's tied to your account for good.
Goozex flagged this game as no-trade in their system along with all of the other Steamworks-activated DRM games.
Steam should really release a deactivation tool/procedure for retail-activated games. Stuff bought online is one thing, but their current implementation for retail activation is kind of rough from a user rights perspective. I mean, you can even give an MMO you're no longer playing to a friend if you give them the account information and clear out private data from the account.
Not that publishers mind, of course.
indeed. I'm totally down with removing the game from my PC and not being able to play it. No problemo.
But it seems valve and Sega have denied me that as an option.
Grrr
I bought a used game (Sin Episode 1) that required a Steam activation, and even though the other person had removed the game from their account, I couldn't activate mine.
I went back and forth with Steam over a dozen emails, and they wouldn't budge: they were insistent that their games could not be transferred from one owner to another.
The thing that ticked me off was that their "Terms of Service" (at the time anyway, maybe it's changed now) made no specific or general reference to this being not allowed, yet their customer service monkeys kept referring me to the Terms of Service. I'd email back asking them to show me specifically where in the language it said I couldn't buy a used game and activate it, and they simply state that it wasn't allowed according to their terms of service. After a while I just gave up. They beat me. In the short run.
The other thing that gets me with this is that nowhere on the box did it state that I had to activate the game with Steam. Heck, the name Steam wasn't even on the box. How was the buyer supposed to know? I had the physical disc, box, and manual in my possession and I couldn't play the game. Didn't make any sense to me.
That's pretty bad! atleast with the retail copy of Empire:TW it made it quite clear on the game box that you needed to activate and play it online by setting up a steam account.
I kind of feel sorry for Sega in this - they took on board all the 'nasty screw my computer up' DRM gripes, decided on something different and now people are pissed with them and steam that they can't even play the game.....or sell it on in frustration!
The Empire packaging is pretty clear about this aspect, though it is in small print. Plus the Steam tie-in was also known well in advance of release and discussed on various message boards. I'm not defending the way Steam handles this, but I'm also not sure how much "I didn't know" works as an excuse anymore. That this hasn't yet been made illegal suggests they have some argument in their favor.
That all said, I could swear that when Steam first launched they did allow the transfer of games from one Steam account to another. If that was true, when was it changed and what was their excuse? It would seem a very easy feature to support.
I wouldn't go this far. I would go so far as to say something like "That this hasn't been made illegal yet suggests that nobody has bothered to bring up the legality of the issue on a large enough scale for them to care."
According to Brad in the last Qt3 DRM bitchfestival, stardock will actually let you transfer licenses, but it's a manual process and they charge ten bucks. It's not encouraged, and you can't find it on their website, but they'll do it.
The really big problem here is that I cannot conceive of an argument that Valve could possibly make that would defend this behavior with boxed retail products. The First Sale Doctrine was originally formulated to represent the consumer's right to resell his individual copy of a piece of copyrighted material to another individual. Where they might have a theoretical leg to stand on when it comes to downloadable stuff (it's not trivial to demonstrate that there's a direct parallel between, say, a CD or a book and a string of bits you get from a server), this is just right out. I think it would be interesting to see a law suit filed against them over this behavior, but the obstacle is that the EFF hasn't cared enough to do it and no sane person is likely to spend lawyer money on a $50 game they can't sell.
But there's a pretty clear difference between "If you pay us $10 we are grudgingly willing to transfer your license to somebody else" and "You have the unconditional permission to sell your game to any other person holding a Stardock account" (or something like that).
I don't buy the nonsense about ever plentiful support costs - I have never in my life called any support number from any developer or publisher of any game I ever played, and I do not know anyone who has.
Also, I believe i would be pretty easy to estabish a system where, for example, every copy of a game comes with 3 support calls (arbitary number) tied to the serial. Once used up, a $$$ support number needs to be called ... there, problem solved.
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rezaf
IIRC, Brad's argument was that people who buy used games (or SW in general) still expect free tech support from the publisher; that represents a drain on the publisher's resources without any additional revenue to cover it.
Of course, I would think the solution to that would be to make games which don't break...
What I don't get is why the whole legal issues surrounding used PC games have yet to be definatively resolved. You have an entire used industry for console games but none of those chains will touch used PC because there are apparently legal issues they don't want to deal with. EB sold used PC games for a while, but that was based on legal agreements with individual publishers.
So clearly there are legal concerns here and I'm wondering if those concerns also impact what Valve and other publishers feel like they can get away with.
That's interesting; my European box clearly states that Steam is required to activate and that the buyer should return the game unopened if he or she does not agree with Steam's subscriber agreement.
I looked up the North American boxart on mobygames and it looks like you're right, this isn't mentioned there at all. Typical publisher screwup.
I'm not sure that's a particularly valid argument. One copy was sold, one copy is eligible for tech support. It shouldn't matter to Stardock if that's the first buyer or the second, as long as they're not both claiming it at the same time.
I dunno - I kind of see where he's coming from. I frequently have to train people not to be stupid about technology because I support that stuff in a place where maybe not everybody knows how it works. Next thing you know, bingo bango there's a promotion and the guy who's doing whatever job depended on that technology now doesn't know what he's doing again and you have to retrain all the old things that you finally got the other person up to speed on so that you didn't have to handle it. If one idiot calls you and asks you how come he can't play your game on his microwave oven then completes it and sells it to somebody else who's stupid enough to need to ask that question, you're basically solving the same problem twice with no new revenue.
That said, the solution here is the Microsoft one - bill for support issues if the problem turns out to be between the keyboard and the chair.
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