It's funny that you're terrified of a rational prediction where the consumer base is not behaving in a totally new manner as opposed to a doomsday prediction where everyone will only buy secondhand copies and then resell them right away because it's supposed to be extremely easy and post-scarcity and because the scenario partly relies on the assumption that Steam will facilitate, nay, push, people to do secondhand transactions. The whole consumer base could completely lose interest in video games as of tomorrow which would certainly spell trouble for the industry, but that's not going to happen, is it? I've already explained why that is.

I've given this example twice or thrice already but anyway: The vast majority of consumers prefer getting a worse deal directly on Steam than go to a completely different(!) website to get a better, Steam-compatible deal cheaper. How are they all suddenly going to bother scouring the internet for secondhand deals?

Another example: The whole history of video games before digital distribution became a thing. The only time the industry ever was in deep trouble was when Atari spammed the market so full of shovelware that consumers gave up, which in turn gave Nintendo its chance to shine. No amount of secondhand trading put the constant growth and evolution of the industry in danger, although funnily enough, the technological evolution of PC games and hardware started to stagnate coincidentally with the rise of digital distribution (and the prevention of reselling :D).

Have you heard the success stories of the more draconian attempts at DRM? Neither have I.

As for your adventure game argument, refer to post 182. You also forget that not everyone wants to keep playing the same multiplayer game over and over and thus they'd be all too happy to let go of their copy.

Wow...

Let me get this straight - we're discussing an unprecedented, radical change in an area that has defied metaphors for years... and you're suggesting that there IS anything like "predictable" sort of behavior that we can assume people will follow the patterns of.
Oh, OK. I still don't care for your predictions.
As long as there are obvious ways things can go wrong and obvious ways things can NOT go wrong, I think it is reasonable to think of the former rather than the latter.

Oh, so you agree with my "tightening of DRM" theory on what Steam will do? After all - if people are so unwilling to look elsewhere AND Steam will be forced to implement a trading system...

How can Steam comply and not provide a way to trade themselves? Are you suggesting merely some sort of API?

Uh-huh. Well - that certainly shone new light on why juggling ownership of immaterial goods on a global scale is nothing to be concerned about. Historia magistra vitae est. Now excuse me while I consult Marcus Aurelius on the subject of forums (they had them in Rome, you know)...

Your explanation in post 182 is mind-bogglingly WRONG in every interpretation I can think of.
It could mean "let them perish", "the market will regulate itself"...
It could mean "people will hang on to their copies because... they will. Trust me"...
It could mean "the longer the game the better"...

It's all nonsense. I love TLJ and I would not part with it. Guess what - not all people are like me.
The fundamental argument has already been made, so let me just reiterate it: prices of digital games go down. They don't really climb up. Once you reach a point where you don't need to IMMEDIATELY have the game at hand to play, you can safely trade it away, knowing that if you buy it for as much as you gave it away - you've lost nothing; if you buy it cheaper - you (kinda) save. There is no postage, no need to meet people, worldwide marketplace, the item you sell is indestructible.

The whole argument is pointless, precisely because of what I have mentioned early on. You keep arguing "but they wouldn't do it!".
Well, guess what:
A) If they didn't do it - they wouldn't need the possibility to do it.
B) If they did do it - they would cause quite a bit of harm.
Furthermore - the very POSSIBILITY of them doing it means that the world will not merely wait for them to - it will anticipate and counteract.

I just came back from playing a game I sunk over 500 hours into. YES - there ARE scenarios. Scenarios in which people don't enjoy a particular game, play only a few matches, whatever... This doesn't change things like e-sport being at play. There are also many non-pros who play regularly or semi-regularly... but that doesn't mean that these sort of games are the ones on which publishers should focus the most!

So you're defaulting to alarmism that suggests an unprecedented mass psychosis. My bad, I was of course making the more incredible assumption here.

By not allowing game resales on their marketplace which is intended for item trade that generates free money to Steam. The only thing they have to do is provide some way of getting a license off your account so that it can be given to someone else. It could just as well be an option in a game's context menu and after some strong confirmation that you're you and you know what you're doing, someone else can use the game's license key.

In physical distribution, generating a new copy to be sold and transporting it to retailers actually costs money, time and resources, making the sales margins fairly low for each step of the way. By your alarmist logic, game business could've never been profitable, since in the early days the audience mostly consisted of young, broke people who traded or shared the few games they had with one another. Now, when a new copy can be created and sent at virtually no expense and with a comparatively insane sales margin, suddenly it's going to be a massive problem? What do you honestly think is going to happen? And I'm not asking your worst case scenario, but the most probable scenario. I'd be especially interested in how you rationalize it.

Your panic seems to be built solely around the idea that everyone in the world will participate in some organized secondhand game sharing circle that makes maximum use of as few copies of a game as logically possible. "If reselling wasn't artificially prevented for digital products, everything would be ruined! You have to trust me on this!"

This part is especially cute. You're trying to discredit my reasonable claim that there are different people in the world which means different consumer behaviors in different situations. Yet you're using the same argument to convince me to worry about a critical mass of resales killing off entire genres because other people aren't like the unique snowflake that you are.

Some people like to play one game all the time, thus my argument is invalid?

Here's food for thought: Why isn't every consumer out there bringing the economy down with their right to refund within a given time period? It would obviously benefit them monetarily, so it makes sense to buy something for the thing you need it for and then return it.

That's OK, I really respect people who can admit they are wrong ^^.

That's because the world doesn't follow "my logic". The problem is: it neither does yours.

I don't know. I also don't want to find out. How about you ?

No. No, not at all.
All it takes is it being more than an "insignificant minority". That's all it takes.
In a mental experiment we could imagine a single copy of a game being played, consecutively, by every gamer in the world. It would take years, but it is not logically impossible. Extending this, we could imagine only a single copy of each game being bought and players swapping games so that everyone is only playing a single game at the time and then passes it onto someone else while simultaneously receiving a different game himself... This would require perfect synchronization, but it is still somewhat imaginable. This mental exercise is not meant to represent reality, since it is purposefully extreme. As its perfection approaches infinity, its likelihood tends to zero.
Now imagine two copies in the world being passed around. Makes things a lot easier, doesn't it ? TWICE as easy. Twice as likely, still almost impossible.
As you adjust the numbers, take into account irrationality, idiosyncrasies, imperfection, impatience, lack of synchronization and coordination... you end up in a scenario much less mathematically beautiful yet operating on the same premise - multiple people having access to the same resource.
Multiple people across the entire goddamn globe.
It's not at all comparable to lending your friend a book and being worried whether he will leave doughnut stains on it. It's not the single-degree, naturally geographically-limited hand-to-hand swaps we know. This is DIFFERENT. This is a completely new can of worms I'm not in the least interested in opening.

No, you DON'T have to trust me on this. Moreover - it doesn't have to be the perfect storm of disasters. It can be terrible, it can be bad, it can hardly change anything... Hell - it might even end up benefiting us all !
I DON'T KNOW what is going to happen. I am not trying to convince you that it HAS TO be bad. On the contrary - you seem hellbent on dismissing any objections on my part by disagreeing with what I say. You haven't really mentioned WHY exactly this experiment should be driven to its conclusion and WHAT results would exactly benefit us all. As much as I adore enigmatic talk of "rights", all I see is a risk with no benefits.

Why, this is hardly what I've been "trying to discredit"... Perhaps if you'd taken the time to try and conceive of a world where my side of the argument makes sense, you would've avoided conflating my stance with an easy-to-dispatch strawman.
The thing is - I'm fairly certain I understand, at least on a rudimentary level, the intuitions that have brought you to where you stand on this issue. The problem is - you don't seem to reciprocate. You've distilled my elaborate mental pictures into a warped image of vulgar certainty of the most extreme scenario. It's pretty fucking trivial to refute such a thing, isn't it?
Try harder, sweetheart. Try to UNDERSTAND. Have more respect for your interlocutor than to assume that he is a raving lunatic.
Otherwise... I don't see this discussion going very far.

As far as snowflakes go, I'm a pretty fucking unique one, I can assure you of as much. I will forgive your ignorance, since you evidently don't know me at all... I will also forgive your increasingly offensive tone. I'm in a good mood.

You... You're not even trying, are you?
"Invalid"? "Thus"?
This isn't a knife fight, I'm trying to show you something. If you're unwilling to see it, we both have already lost.

Probably because there's not enough anonymity involved, too much walking around, and the fact that (as far as I know) most places won't take back things that have been evidently used. Also: see this.
By the way: that's unrelated. Like I said - I find it odd to argue for something by saying that people won't do it. Why bother ?
It's also worth mentioning that people cause harm by merely BEING ABLE to trade digitally, not to mention actually doing it... as I've already said.

:)

I know that nothing serious is going to happen to the industry financially because people aren't money-grubbing robots as a whole, and the industry has been geared to thrive even with very low sales margins, the likes that make any potential effect from secondhand sales pale in comparison – the only part of the industry that currently doesn't have to deal with secondhand sales is the digital distribution side, and with their sales margins they can afford one hell of a secondhand sales craze.

I know that it would be a positive thing for the consumers, especially the less wealthy ones because they could take more risks and afford to spend on new releases again.

I know that individual titles would have much broader audiences which in turn translates into more awareness and a bigger fanbase for a game series and its developer because of how mathematics work. I know from knowing the industry and from my own experience that developers generally wish their games to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, but I don't know if you give much value to non-financial effects here.

That's a beautiful mental exercise, but it doesn't take into account the very real example I've been repeating for a while now: the combination of various degrees of ignorance, laziness, loyalty, convenience etc. causes people to ignore a cheap offer that includes both an installer and a Steam key in favor of buying a game directly on Steam for more money.

It might surprise you but there's already something similar to secondhand sales in the form of sites getting their keys from cheaper countries and selling them on as bargains. Also, there are those who buy multiple keys as gifts straight into their email from sales and attempt to sell them on auction sites when the firsthand sale ends. These two phenomena are very real and you can go and buy a cheaper license that way right now if you want. Yet they're not the first choice for the majority of people to get their games.

I appreciate your effort in educating me on the virtues of eSports which I'm all too familiar with by the way, but it doesn't exactly hold relevance in that even singleplayer games with no multiplayer or sandbox can be a rare commodity in the secondhand market simply because their owners enjoyed them in a manner not unlike enjoying a good movie.

:)

Of course you must realize that I was trying to draw attention to the "selling off your Longest Journey" aspect. As it just so happens, that game was quite uncommon on auction sites and it sold for high prices, something I know from personal experience because I couldn't afford to get it new (nor secondhand) in those times. I know it's bad practice to base one's argument on personal experience, but I don't think your adventure game argument holds water in the Longest Journey's case.

Weren't you supposed to not know whether it causes harm or not?

*^^*
I sincerely hope reality corroborates your convictions, I really do...

If people keep ignoring the possibility, what good does introducing it serve?
Are you suggesting that only those in need will seek out alternate means, such as digital trading?

Again - I'd love this to be true.

You're right; I even mention that you don't know me, so you couldn't possibly make an accurate call in this regard...
For some reason it struck a cord deep within me. From memories to dreams, it skewered my very being and left a fragrance of something meaningful...
I guess this caught me a bit off-balance, irrelevant.

It doesn't have to be TLJ, that was merely an example...

"Can" cause h-...
Meh, forget it ;P.

That is an insightful comment. If you are not already familiar with it, you might be interested in reading this free pdf:

Against Intellectual Property by N. Stephan Kinsella

Kinsella argues that property rights arise from physical scarcity, and that intellectual property laws such as copyright and patents create artificial and unjustifiable scarcity of otherwise non-scarce or infinite things and ideas.

In other words: Copyright and patents make a non-scarce thing or idea scarce so that it can have value like finite physical resources. So you understand why your comment brought his work to mind.

I'm still reading and thinking about the particulars and implications of Kinsella's arguments, and I'm not interested in debating his views at present. Just dropping the link in case you or anyone else would be interested. :)