Over the past year, the gaming industry has managed to successfully protect itself from the rising threats typically associated with information goods such as indestructability and reproducibility. Registration keys and consequently mandatory server connection ruled out reproducibility, whereas indestructability was covered with CDs and later DVDs as distribution mediums.

This might change soon. On 17 September 2019, a judge in France on a case regarding the resale of videogames (Torbet, 2019). This does not only have consequences for the videogames market but might spill-over to other information good markets. The case in question is between Que Choisir, a French consumer organization, and Valve, an American manufacturer operating in France. The games sold through Valve’s online platform, Steam, are online for sale through the Steam market and cannot be resold; something Que Choisir does not agree with.
The French consumer organization argues that games sold on Valve’s online platform Steam should be threated in the same way as games sold through physical stores (Que Choirsir, 2019). Que Choirsir illustrates that the consumer purchases a licence to use the software. If you buy a physical videogame, you buy the license to use the software together with the disk; once you’re done playing the game, you can resell it. The same should be possible for online bought videogames.

Valve opposed this argument, claiming that the consumer buys a subscription to use the software not a license. The subscription allows the consumer to use the software forever, and therefore, established consumer protections that allow consumers to resell licenses do not apply. If consumer protections would count for online videogames, such as the right to resell, a direct competition would spark from the online second-hand game market. Second-hand online games are perfect substitutes of the new games sold on Steam.

On 17 September 2019, the French court ruled that Valve does not sell subscriptions through Steam, but licences, and thus the established consumer protections established in European law do apply to online purchased video games (Roedie, 2019). This has enormous consequences for the online games market, due to the indestructability of the good. Moreover, this might also have consequences for other online markets such as iTunes. Do you agree with the French judge? Do you think that digital information goods should have a second-hand market despite being indestructible?