When you buy a game, or any software, you are buying a license to use that software. If you are selling a game, then you are giving up your license to play the game and allowing another person to use it. You aren't adding to the number of people using the license. You are subtracting 1 and adding 1. It's still just 1. If the number of people using the same license was increased, then the publisher would have a gripe. As it is, one game still equals just one user. If a publisher wants to make the license non-transferable, then they can. But when the other guy doesn't make that change, they shouldn't be surprised when everyone buys the other guy's games instead.

No they cannot! Would you people stop with this license bullshit already? You are only parroting their lobbying points. Case law almost entirely disagrees with this, especially with regards to consumer goods.

Actually, they can in Germany. It has been confirmed by our supreme court. In the Half Life 2 decision of 2010 they confirmed that Valve has the right to use software to bind the game to one account. You can still sell the physical part of the game (which makes absolutely no sense at all, of course). They do have to make this clear at the back of the box.

Usually a "licence" given into the public is transferable. Like music, dvds and the such. Unless it is explicitly stated by the seller that this is not the case, as with Steam.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with case law the world over, I was only speaking about the US and probably should have said so.

It is a very unusual judgement, considering consumer rights are in question. E.g. in Poland it is the way you said it was (If I understood Keeveek correctly). Maybe I will properly read up on it tomorrow during work.

Sorry to interrupt, but would you guys mind porting this thread into one with a grammatically correct title? Every time I see it I die a little inside.

If a publisher adds the sentence, "the license to use this software is non-transferrable" into their end-user agreement, and the original user agrees to it, then it is binding.
That is all they have to do to make it non-transferrable, and then you are breaking the law when you sell the game to a friend.
They absolutely CAN do this.
Anything written into the EULA is legally binding if you agree to it.

Not in Germany. If you can't see the EULA before buying the game, it is void.
It is only legal because those terms can be seen prior to buying.

Well, US case law distinctly disagrees with your position and I'm not interested in arguing about it. It is what it is, that kind of shit has only ever held up in a EULA for commercial (for business) software in US court and never once for mass market software, such as games.

Hmm... I don't think so. They sold the product once, that should be enough. I don't see any reason why they should profit from it again if someone else decides to sell it or trade it in.

If I pay my car off and then sell it privately, the original dealer certainly has no reasonable claim to part of what I sell it for.

I know, some people say "Well, you're not buying a thing, you're buying a license." So in that sense, you're not buying anything at all, you're just paying for the privilege to access it. So this argument seems to be what they are "selling" you is permission to play it, but not the actual game itself. And then they complain that they're not making enough money? "Here, you can play this, but you don't really OWN it so you can't do anything else with it."

Used games are not harmful. Game developers disagrees with it because they see that their new games are bad and weak and gamers are returning "good old games" so they want to forbid used games tradeins/selling and want to make money selling all those HD remakes and things like that for big money. That's my point of view.

The industry is harmful to used games. This is why Game went out of business. The loss of Game is a huge blow to the game industry for obvious reasons, but Game brought it upon themselves.

Buy a game, return it for bugger all credit (gamestop, the current FIFA game will get you €6, they will put it on sale at €5 less than the new version), people are not stupid enough to buy it 2nd hand at such a ridiculous price, so they get stuck with a huge inventory they cannot shift, its "value" looks good on the balance sheet, but its as useful as a letter to santa in a monetary sense.

Consequently bricks n mortar shops go out of business, leaving us with Digi Download "shops".

I cba getting into a dissection of what that entails, but basicallly the "shops" are killing themselves, leaving us with a future of nothing but digi downloads and ever increasing DLC costs.

Personally, If I cant buy the game in a shop, without connecting to eg. Steam/Origin, I will get a console version, I want a "tangible" item to purchase, but thats just me. I got burned with digi, I wont in future, I'm sure there are plently of people like me, hopefully there will be enough to keep devs straight.

I will support GoG/CDPR because they support their players, I have 3 retail box copies of Witcher 2, CE and version 2.0, plus the 360 enhanced version, also the Prima Guide is on its way, I'm sure they will get a %age of that too (and of course my d/l back up on GoG). The Witcher, I have the original red box version and the "ehnanced" version, my point is, the quality of the developer will always win out over marketing.

Hopefully other devs will see the potential of CDPRs vision and avoid DRM and see the potential of consoles, opening up the availability of their games, rather than restricting it.

@F1ach

+1 to you my friend. Very well said.

Unfortunately there are rumors that future consoles will have to be always connected the internet to even start a game so I think SONY and Microsoft will push the use of DRM's even more. :/

While it's not impossible that this would happen, I wouldn't worry about it. There is literally nothing backing up these rumors, they're likely the equivalent of trolling.

The way that current gaming tries to control and shut down the second-hand market (despite buying and selling used items of virtually *any* other kind being the norm) is one of the reasons I've dropped out of playing current games.

It echoes the same as the piracy argument: companies feel like they're losing out on money (which is fine)... but don't hose honest customers just to try and wring out a few extra bucks.