The European Court of Justice recently ruled that gamers have a right to re-sell their used digital games stating, “an author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet“.
This basically means that it’s illegal for game companies to prohibit the re-sale of their digital games to other gamers. Meaning it you want to sell your used MMORPG account to someone, it is now legal in Europe and the company can no longer ban you for doing it.
This has even greater implications for services like Steam, who’s entire library of games can fall under this new law. Although in the case of Steam, the law does not state the company has to go out of their way to create a service to allow gamers the ability to re-sell their games.
This is good or bad news depending where you fall on the selling MMO accounts controversy. I sold my D2 account about 10 years ago, so I’m for it as I never agreed with the companies who said they own my account, I always found it to be an overreach of their power. Hopefully we’ll see something similar happen in the US within the next few years.
Hi, I think you have an interpretation by far too large of the decision.
1) It’s a decision about a program with an unlimited time period agreement. As some MMORPG are linked to an agreement based on subscription, from my understanding it may only concerned games like Guild Wars and not “subscription based” MMORPG.
2) Whenever it concerns games like Guild Wars, the decision state you can re-sell the license and even offer for download the program as you wish (as far as you are the original lawfull acquirer), but the decision never talked about information logged on the editor servers such user profile (and obviously characters, equipment, achievements and so long).
Thinking, it will be automaticly linked to the license is really optimistic and at least not mentionned by the decision.
3) For item selling games, it maybe another story, but once again, I guess it will depend if the sales are based on an unlimited time period agreement or not.
The court case stated nothing about a subscription, it was a broad statement saying companies must allow gamers to resell their digital games. It’s irrelevant if you ask me whether the game has a subscription or not. Of course that’s my interpretation, I’m not a lawyer, but unless it specifically says “subscription games do not count”, then they must be included in this ruling.