Steam Big Picture Mode "coming soon" + Valve not planning on changing service after EU ruling

[ríomhaire]

PCGamesN are reporting two pieces of information from Valve's Director of Business Development Jason Holtman. First up on Steam's long awaited Big Picture Mode: "It's coming. Soon."


The other piece of information is regarding a recent ruling by the EU Court of Justice that "The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a licence isexhausted on its first sale". In other words EU citizens have the right to sell on software licences they purchase, even if the licence itself claims otherwise. What is unclear is whether or not this means companies will be forced to make it possible to trade licences. There is no current way to decouple a game you have played from your Steam account and according to Jason "we don’t have any plans to change." Another court case will likely have to be brought up to decide whether Valve are legally obliged to allow EU citizens to sell their games on.


Also, as we reported on our Facebook page, Planet Philip, a long-running site dedicated to Half-Life mods and maps and host of several mapping contests, unexpectedly shut its doors on Monday due to the stress it was causing its curator. It is now back online and Philip has made a blog post to explain the situation. Now that the site is back online we highly recommend trying some of the mods from his Hall of Fame.

 

[Paulaner]

The EU ruling will affect not only digital download platforms, but the whole DRM scheme of limited activations. It's a revolutionary change. We'll see if publishers and digital platforms are willing to comply or face legal controversies and class actions.

 

[Gloone]

This is huge news for Valve. Just when the world was figuring out a distribution service which works, the EU comes along with its outdated rules and buggers everything up.

Sorry to you 'freedom of information' folks but your philosophy, although probably well intended, will bankrupt Valve and ultimately all other media creators. Just look what the implications of this ruling would be. Ownership of media is meaningless when you can transfer the product instantaneously; 'the game' doesn't actually exist anywhere, it's software, and pretending it's a single object is absurd. Whenever you want to play a game for a few hours, all you have to do is buy the rights for that period of time. As soon as you're done, sell them back into the pool. In fact this process may as well be totally automated. The end result is that by shuffling the software around the world (despite the fact that this is a fictitious notion) to wherever it's requested, hardly anybody ever ends up buying the game; the developer makes about a tenth of what they would have, and that is not enough to sustain future game development.

Personally I have no problems with how Steam currently works; that is, buying the lifetime rights to the media for myself, and I don't see why Valve shouldn't be able to request it; the customer is free to decide whether they accept those terms or not. At any rate it is the only workable and sensible approach to video game retail.

 

[Stigmata]

Requisite post claiming that Big Picture Mode will synergise with the eventual Linux version of the Steam client which, in conjunction with Valve selling custom-built Linux PCs as Steamboxes, will allow the PC games industry to crush the console industry completely.