Tendo City

http://www.gog.com/news/announcing_our_new_guarantee

Now, I'm very strongly in favor of digital rights for games. That is, that once you buy a game digitally, you should ahve the same rights you would with a physical copy to sell or return your game. This move does not give us that badly-needed right of digital resale, but it does move things forward on the other front, and that's great.

Still, the limits of this are important: You can only return a game if you bought it within a week and never downloaded the game, or if you tell support that the game won't work on your computer and they can't help you fix the problem. They have no way of proving if people in the second group are telling the truth or not, but said that people who use this too often could lose this right because of abuse. So yeah, this sounds good, but really it's only a very small step forwards... but anything forwards is good, so I'll take it.

Of course, since GOG is DRM-free I can see why they wouldn't want to add resale (since there's absolutely no way to keep people from downloading and then selling a game), but PC games in the '90s were usually like that, and the decade was a pretty good time for PC gaming... sure, there were codewheels and CD keys, but those still allow resale, if you sell the whole package. That's nothing like digital games today. Publishers are probably happy about that, but consumers should be very unhappy.

Anyway though, apparently on Origin (yes, much-maligned Origin) you can return EA titles within 24 hours of buying them, so there's that too... but nothing from Steam, not even this minor step GOG has done. I wonder if/when they will budge...

I agree we should have the same rights, but keep this in mind. Even with physical goods, there is no "right" to a return. Plenty of stores out there have a "no refund" policy. I don't demand a "refund" policy from online stores as a result, but I DO demand a system where I can give or sell my copy of a digital item to someone else.

EA's Origin is hated but I can't for the life of me figure out why. It works basically exactly like Steam. Some say that's reason enough to hate it, but really, do you want there to be only ONE digital store in all the PC-verse? Isn't it good to have some competition?

Origin is the blander, less functional cousin to Steam.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:I agree we should have the same rights, but keep this in mind. Even with physical goods, there is no "right" to a return. Plenty of stores out there have a "no refund" policy. I don't demand a "refund" policy from online stores as a result, but I DO demand a system where I can give or sell my copy of a digital item to someone else.

I agree. Being able to give or sell my game to someone else is the really important right. Being able to return it if it doesn't work is great, and this is an important step forward, but being able to sell or trade something is even more vital! The current system is ridiculous. As I said I understand why things are as they are, but that does not make it okay, it isn't.

As for Origin, I haven't used it myself, so I don't know how well it works...

As GR said, it is like Steam, but with less functionality. They DO have a "return in 24 hours" policy, but aside from the slightly lower feature set it works very well. Certainly it is far easier to use than the Games for Windows Live store ever was. While I GENERALLY prefer Steam, the fact that Origin exists as competition to keep Steam in check is nothing but a bonus, and frankly I have no problem buying games from Origin when they're exclusive to that store.

Yeah, without so much competition, it's very unlikely that Steam would be anywhere near as good as it is, either in features or in frequency and depth of sales. It's not only Origin that's competing with them, of course; there's also GOG, UPlay, GamersGate, Impulse, Gamefly (remember they bought Direct2Drive), and surely more. Most of those also have sales, some quite deeply discounted. None allow you to return games (with no restrictions) or trade games with others, though, digital resale is still not something we have... but at least it does get much better deals than you see on consoles. Sure, DD console games have sales sometimes too, but not with as many titles on sale, and not with prices cut as low most of the time, either.

But on the other hand, it's still easy to find physical copies of lots of console games (which are not tied to one-time-use keys!), which means easy resale... that is a definite plus.