Bethesda threatens to sue for game resale

Yes and that would also be bullshit, even if the game was unwrapped. It isn’t Bethesda’s place to police resold copies of their games. If Amazon objected to the item being labeled new they should have taken it down.

It’s their place if they’re policing non-authorized resellers representing their products as ‘new’, though.

That’s hilarious. What’s their definition of a valid defect? Let’s say I buy Skyrim on PC now. What’s my recourse if they don’t fix the bugs that have been part of Skyrim since launch within the next 90 days?

Also the standard practice of America’s largest gaming specialty chain. (Well, only gaming specialty chain, these days.)

A scratched disk, basically.

How many times has someone taken them up on this offer? I’d bet all of… 0

That’s still bullshit. They can’t control how it gets sold once it leaves their warehouse. The person buying from Hupp wasn’t buying from Amazon. They’re buying from the Amazon Marketplace.

If it’s still in the original shrinkwrap, it’s new. It can be sold as such. There are thousands upon thousands of listings like it all over Amazon, eBay and more.

Yeah, my problem with that is that “New In Box” is just a standard way to refer to products of all types in the reseller market. It’s common usage.

If their line of BS actually held any water, it seems to me the only entity that would have an issue would be Amazon. And Amazon apparently didn’t.

I guess it’s like a car, which you just bought and drove off the lot and are trying to sell as “new”. Or whatever.

Used PC games were the main thing I liked about EB back in the day.

That’s how I feel, too, but I think this is a small skirmish in a larger war over ownership in the digital age.

For centuries, you bought a book or a newspaper, and the thing was yours to read or resell or whatever. The producer had zero rights – and probably more to the point in real life power struggles, almost zero practical ability – to alter it, to use it to keep tabs on you, to rope you into any contractual obligations, etc.

Television served as a kind of Intro to Intrusions, in that that medium got people used to the idea that part of the price of watching was to allow peddlers (expert peddlers) to bang on at you and family.

But for all the great things digital has brought us, it is busy attacking the idea that we buy stuff and that is the end of the interaction, we are simply the new owners of an item. Now consumption routinely comes with snooping. Nudging. Commercial manipulation, and I am pretty sure that social/political manipulation is going to increase exponentially. But the fact that we pretty much have to agree to endless contractual obligations, in order take part in this digital world, that is an enormous barrier to us doing much about it.

Notice that it is now all but impossible to prevent a Windows 10 update, no matter what they decide to include.

So… the potential loss of the right to sell a still-wrapped game as new, regardless of the warranty? I see this is just a one more pushback in something much larger.

This is a physical item being resold.

Sort of. It is a physical item which you load on your computer and then, in order to use it, you agree to some contractual terms, whatever they might be. And you agree because that is the way things are done in the new technology environment. (Imagine how out of place it would have been if a book had come with a wrapping which said that if you unwrap the book you just bought, you agreed to all kinds of stuff. Not to mention how unenforceable, given the inability of a book vendor to supervise further transactions. Even actual photocopying was tough to catch.)

So the new technology environment comes to rule over even a sort-of-physical-item transaction.

Nah, it’s a license that happens to be in a box. : )

This company is completely overreaching. If someone buys something new from Amazon or their marketplace and it turns out to be used, Amazon is typically going to take care of it, and the seller will lose out. It has nothing to do with Bethesda.

The only time I’ve heard about creator company going after a seller are for counterfeits which is completely different, well aside from Netgear which just seems to enjoy suing people.

So if the guy takes it out of the shrink wrap and sells it as “used”. Then Bethesda doesn’t sue…ahhh lawyers.

What would have happened if they listed it as Like-New?

What is the Neatgear story there, Nesire? I am uninformed, and interested.

If it’s not opened, why isn’t it new? There is nothing out there that says the only person than can resell new games is some storefront. That’s ridiculous. This company is out of their mind.