this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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I'm not sure how to feel about this, to be honest.
I don't have any serious plans or anything, but I do want to dabble in a bit of gamedev. Nothing major, just like an RPG or something that I put on Steam for like $5. I imagine there's a lot of people who take bets on their future by releasing games that cost $10 or $20.
Why would anyone pay full price for games if you could get them from a trading platform for like 75%? I bet there's a lot of people that would buy my game, play through it once and then sell it for maybe $4. And others who thinks anytime that pays full price for a game is an idiot.
Indie Devs would have to rise prices, perhaps drastically, to cover the lost revenue here. This would also put an end to Steam sales, because the instant you put your game on sale it sets the price for it in third party markets.
What about bigger games like BG3? What's stopping me from buying it full price, copying the files somewhere and then instantly reselling it? It would probably force them to implement strict DRM restrictions, and probably the nasty rootkit kind.
I'm personally against DRM and don't want to release a game with it, but the fact that this lowers the bar to piracy so much may force my hand.
I honestly believe this could spell the end of the indie gaming scene.
The same thing that's stopping you from downloading the files now. A combination of ethics and the value legitimately owning the game adds to your purchase.
The ethics get muddier for your average person, though. Piracy is (to a good chunk of people) clearly wrong: there is something someone made that most people had to pay for and you're getting it for free. That's not how things are supposed to work.
With this, you are still paying money for the game, it's just cheaper, but games are cheaper when they're on sale, too. I think a much larger group of people will make use of "used" digital games without giving a ton of thought to the fact that the game creator is getting less than those who are fine with pirating games. On top of that, ethics aside, one of those activities is illegal and the other potentially legal, which does affect how people make decisions as well.
I don't think buying used is unethical if the law establishes that, just buying to download and immediately resell, which I don't think that many would rationalize as any better. I think the people most likely to do it are people who pay to pirate now who might pay a little for a slightly easier experience.
I fully acknowledge that it's a grey area, but I've personally always considered resale of digital goods (goods which can be obtained purely digitally, even if sold in a physical medium) to be unethical, although legal. If I'm going to pay money to it, I want the money to go to the person who created it, not to someone else who happened to purchase it or, worse, some company that provides no value other than encouraging those transactions.
To me, resale on physical goods is ethical because there are two core differences with those which could be acquired purely digitally. Physical goods degrade with use, providing reduced value compared to new goods. And it is better for unwanted physical goods to continue to provide value for someone than for it to enter a landfill.