French court informs Valve that customers have the right to resell purchased Steam games

Valve has been informed by a French court that its customers should be able to resell purchased games on its platform.

As part of a consumer rights conversation echoing throughout the European Union, the court has ruled that Steam products should be treated in the same way as physical games. Just like how users can resell a physical game to a used game store, or eBay, digital licenses should be treated the same way.

According to French website Numerama, the court ruling is the result of three years of proceedings.

“In a judgement rendered on September 17th by the Paris District Court… The Association for the Defence of Consumer Rights managed to obtain the cancellation of a number of clauses that Valve imposed on Steam,” the website says.

The biggest cancellation is that of Valve’s licensing of Steam games. Although you pay full price for titles on Steam, you do not own games you buy on Steam. This ruling changes that: by allowing you to sell your Steam games that you’ve purchased, gamers now have some form of control over their titles. The ruling doesn’t just apply to games. Games, movies, trading cards and more are all included.

How Steam will handle this ruling is unknown. For example, some titles on Steam have been delisted with Valve being unable to sell certain titles. Would Valve be breaching copyrights by allowing customers to resell unsellable products that have already been sold?