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.
That would be an awesome feature but finance bros will find a way to abuse it in milliseconds.
This is exactly my worry.
Suppose that on some level, this was possible. You wouldn’t see nice, cozy instances of people who’ve finished their old collection selling them to low-income folks that just got their first Steam Deck. You’d put some games on sale for $10, and an automated Python script would automatically buy them and put them back up for sale for $49.98, one cent less than the new copies being sold.
When literally every single digital copy of a game is “equivalent”, the used games market just doesn’t make sense - although there’s a hundred third-party sites that would like it to work that way so they can take their un-earned cut.
I think there is a digital games storefront that lets you sell your games (robot cache maybe?) and it seems pretty NFT-ish, so yeah
I just had a look at their offer and it has a few issues.
https://help.robotcache.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029179691-Resale-Policy
So they keep 75% of resale revenue, the purchaser doesn’t see any discounts, and it can’t be used to access delisted games?
Its a bit of a monkey paw.
If that’s what it has to take - go for it.
I imagine that’s the only thing they could get the publishers to agree to. Still, it’s better than nothing!