10th December 2013, 8:34 PM
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...
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...
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