[rebuilder]

The first thing that comes to mind is contracts. Imagine you're signing a contract to let Valve sell your games. That's fairly straightforward - you agree on the terms for any given sale, probably Valve take a fixed percentage of the sale cost, and you sign. (Any lawyers among us, I beg your forgiveness!)

Now, imagine the contract gives Valve the right to let third parties resell the games at a price of their choosing. What now? Do you, the publisher, still get a cut? How much? What if it's a used game being resold for the Nth time? There's quite a bit of complexity being introduced here.

[meheleventyone]

In the old physical store days distributors and retailers held the power so they cornered the resale market by letting people trade in old games for money off new games. This let them sell the same product twice (or more!) without paying any money from the resale up the chain to the publisher or further to developers.

Valve already has a store that allows for resale of digital assets with an attached transaction fee. So naively it’d be an extension of that to games.

Whether they think they can cut out the people upstream remains to be seen.

[cameronbrown]

> Valve already has a store that allows for resale of digital assets with an attached transaction fee. So naively it’d be an extension of that to games.

Does first sale doctrine apply here? I think this would violate that.