GMG: EU resale ruling will "shake up the digital distribution market"

Today's eye-catching ruling that publishers cannot prevent gamers reselling downloaded games will, in the long-term, "shake up the digital distribution market", according to one affected online shop.

Green Man Gaming boss Paul Sulyok told Eurogamer that the Court of Justice of the European Union's ruling is "very disruptive", but insisted that in the short-term little will change.

[Emilio_Estevez]

Wonder how long the distributors will have to comply with the rulings?

[SeekDev]

Apparently they don't have to, at least that's what the article states about midway through.

[Emilio_Estevez]

The whole thing sounds strange and disjointed. I'm not sure this will hold up.

[SeekDev]

I'm not sure either, what's the point of making a ruling but not enforcing it? I don't get it. I should have chosen a Law course for uni next year, damn.

[Mintyrebel]

See thats what I dont understand... whats the point in saying that we can trade in our used digital downloads and then saying they dont have to let us? They'll never do it...

[SeekDev]

I don't know, Steam might. They're open to experimentation, they've already got the Steam Trading base for it. And they value their customers, imo. So they might go for it.

@below. No bubs. Anyways, Origin won't do it because they like keeping control over their customers. Steam's sales would considerably drop if they implemented this. They'd have to get their economist to research the possible outcomes.

[Mintyrebel]

While thats true the trading system mainly revolves around you still buying the hats in TF2 and stuff like that, this could seriously damage their sales. And Origin will NEVER do it.

[PirateThom]

Valve won't do it either... I'm not sure you've realised, Valve are still a business, they don't do things because they're good for their users, they do it for publicity to make people use the service. They won't impact their own profit.

[sikbeta]

This thing is really weird in a sense of selling an "used dd game" is not the same as "used physical game", I mean, a physical copy devaluate its price with time and condition of the *physical* product, a digital copy is intact, it's the same through years and only devaluate its price with time but not affected by its physical condition, a huge selling game that cost $60 on day one, could be sold @ $60 after months, because there is no change in its condition

IF this is take off, people can buy dd games day one, sell within a week for the same price or lower and Devs will get less money, so, the whole complain about used market will transfer to dd as well and with already lower priced in the dd market, things like summer sales will have to disappear, because when the price is set lower, people will grab it, play and sell, so, there will be no point in set the normal prices before those kind of sales

[miyamoto]

Maybe this is the reason for the PS Vita single account thing and the online gaming digital pass codes on PS3.