[vonmoltke]

> Sooo...Valve has a history of changing its policies to follow the law?

The article isn't well written, but I believe the point is about Valve making the change worldwide, even though their legal obligation is just to do it in France (or possibly the EU).

[hnarn]

From the article:

> the high court ruled that, under European Union law, Steam customers have a right to be able to resell ‘dematerialised’ goods, i.e., digital games on Steam.

IANAL but while this is a French high court, they have clearly interpreted EU (not domestic) law, so I think it's safe to say that if Valve loses the appeal, or decides to change it regardless ahead of time, they likely won't take the unnecessary risk of not rolling it out across the EU.

[shadowgovt]

If they have to build infrastructure to support reselling game use licenses to comply with this law, it's unlikely they'll be able to justify releasing it to France only; there'll be backlash from their users in other countries.

[londons_explore]

Companies release features to some regions all the time. For example, in Google Photos, you can search by face in the USA but not Europe (due to differing privacy expectations).

[shadowgovt]

Huh. TIL regarding Google Photos.

That sucks; glad I'm in the US because I use that feature often. It's great for when friends ask for the photos I took of them.

In any case, I predict the Steam situation will differ because privacy and retail goods are valued differently. Americans are going to want that feature if Steam has to implement it, and they have options regarding what game store they use; it becomes a point of competitive advantage for Steam to switch it on in the States. They'll have to do the calculus on whether they lose more potential developers if they do vs. lose more potential store users if they don't.

[Ultcyber]

Funny enough, if you use a USA based VPN server, the option will appear on your account and you'll be able to activate it. It Will stay activr for your account even if you switch back from VPN

[londons_explore]

That's deliberate... Those kind of "annoy the customer" limitations are all for PR/legal/business reasons, and the engineers building the features want to make the restrictions as easy to get around as possible.