I Want Out

[Zyxpsilon]

Yep, but aren't we in a "Virtual" (and International, btw) world when it comes to distributed products?
They can all have as many different or strict EULA, contract clauses, specific provisions, DRM spyware tricks, occlusions of activity and what else.
It comes down to a very simple fact; Justice on the www isn't applicable in terms of liability for every sides of the consuming equation.

You buy somethin' in the US, hump on a plane, land in a fiscal paradise, remotely open an account in a Swiss Bank from your precious portable, pack up your gears and aim for the next stop on a weird voyage to anonymity.
The playing field is wide & large and even if States & Corporations try real hard to catch everyone, the generally accepted or enforced Laws are impractical for bandwidth driven flow of goods & services. Presently!

The only International Justice device that works as intended is the Hague Tribunal for War criminals... but it has good reasons to do so.

OP, angry?
How many PCs did you *HAVE TO* buy over the years? OS'es? Other softwares? Licensing Versions from A to Z?
The car analogy is quite appropriate. You need fuel and if bad luck offers you a flat tire while you're driving it, you can't continue on your merry way without replacing it with another!

As for getting rid of that CiV copy by transfering rights of usage, No Luck i guess. Since, Steam has a knack for solid protection of their *Legal* customers. Which, in fact, makes sense when taken into context; i bought, i like, i use and i don't care if anyone else has angry reactions towards the Developper.
Consuming is a trap. You're either smart enough to strike the best deals around or you don't.
Any silly reasons are fair enough to justify being angry - after all. The trick is to find the exact opposite when_if necessary.
I'm an indirect Beta-Tester for CiV? Sooooo what. I can do whatever i please with my damn ca$h.

 

[brxbrx]

"It's okay if I steal a car, so long as I forge some registration."

If you steal a car, then some dude's missing his car. This is not the case.

 

[JohnnyW]

OP, angry?

I personally felt that it was quite clear that he was angry. The multiple times where he stated "I'm angry" somehow gave it away.

 

[brxbrx]

I personally felt that it was quite clear that he was angry. The multiple times where he stated "I'm angry" somehow gave it away.

For me, it was the emoticon.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Elliptic & esoteric kinda question mark(s) added to the Angry confusion, i guess.

 

[lschnarch]

The point is - and that has been discussed in length already - Steam restricts customer rights gain by custom and practise.

Companies don't care about legality, rights or justice. They care about sales figures.
Therefore, the attempts to restrict customer rights in terms of reselling an once bought product have been made 30 years ago already (the infamous EULA paragraphs reading: "You may not sell the product in whatever terms to anybody else!").
Nobody cared, since there was no means to effectively prohibit this kind of doing (disclaimer: I am *NOT* talking about selling/giving away a copy of something while still keeping a copy for your own purposes).

Actually, it is very similar to restricting your rights to resell/give away a record, a tape, a CD, a book, whatever.
In neither case you ever expected to hold special rights on the piece of music, movie, game or literature distributed by these items. Yet, everybody (rightfully) assumed to have the right to give away the copy (under abovementioned restriction of not holding a copy for yourself).

Now, with Steam (and comparable "services") the industry has got a means to effectively prohibit you from doing what custom and practices tell you to do, if you ever decide to not want anything anymore.
This is a deep cut into consumer rights. And it will get worse.
With ebooks, we will be confronted with the same issues in some years, as soon as there is enough market penetration.
With music, they already tried to do so.

The pure fact that most customers of Steam are inexperienced adolescents, to lazy to get out of their chair to buy a product in a store and therefore praising Steam for "the great sales" doesn't change the fact that Steam is an assault against customer rights.

Yes, I have bought the game too, that way contributing to Steam customer numbers. And I am angry about myself for having done so. It was a silly thing to do, where my desire to have the chance to explore Civ5 has overridden better judgement.
This was a fault of mine, and not only do I regret this but I won't continue it.

And the more people becoming aware of the fact that Steam doesn't provide services for customers, but exclusively services for the industry, the better.

Stay away from Steam, as this leads onto a slippery road spiraling downwards into a society where you as a customer are cut off from your initial rights.

 

[brxbrx]

The point is - and that has been discussed in length already - Steam restricts customer rights gain by custom and practise.

Companies don't care about legality, rights or justice. They care about sales figures.
Therefore, the attempts to restrict customer rights in terms of reselling an once bought product have been made 30 years ago already (the infamous EULA paragraphs reading: "You may not sell the product in whatever terms to anybody else!").
Nobody cared, since there was no means to effectively prohibit this kind of doing (disclaimer: I am *NOT* talking about selling/giving away a copy of something while still keeping a copy for your own purposes).

Actually, it is very similar to restricting your rights to resell/give away a record, a tape, a CD, a book, whatever.
In neither case you ever expected to hold special rights on the piece of music, movie, game or literature distributed by these items. Yet, everybody (rightfully) assumed to have the right to give away the copy (under abovementioned restriction of not holding a copy for yourself).

Now, with Steam (and comparable "services") the industry has got a means to effectively prohibit you from doing what custom and practices tell you to do, if you ever decide to not want anything anymore.
This is a deep cut into consumer rights. And it will get worse.
With ebooks, we will be confronted with the same issues in some years, as soon as there is enough market penetration.
With music, they already tried to do so.

The pure fact that most customers of Steam are inexperienced adolescents, to lazy to get out of their chair to buy a product in a store and therefore praising Steam for "the great sales" doesn't change the fact that Steam is an assault against customer rights.

Yes, I have bought the game too, that way contributing to Steam customer numbers. And I am angry about myself for having done so. It was a silly thing to do, where my desire to have the chance to explore Civ5 has overridden better judgement.
This was a fault of mine, and not only do I regret this but I won't continue it.

And the more people becoming aware of the fact that Steam doesn't provide services for customers, but exclusively services for the industry, the better.

Stay away from Steam, as this leads onto a slippery road spiraling downwards into a society where you as a customer are cut off from your initial rights.

steam rights are but a license. just like paying a life time membership for a club.
and honestly, for me, who has a good, steady internet connection, steam makes things so much more practical. It's a shame you can't resell, or get a refund. But I still love steam.

 

[Shurdus]

You can't legally sell it.

If Steam find out you are sharing your account, they will cancel it, making all of your Steam games unplayable.

I fear Civ 5 is what you get when the organ grinder is working on Civ-ville.

Maybe they will rescue the game, but rescuing it will be a mammoth task.

Firaxis is now on my sh1t list of developers that cannot be trusted.

Why can the OP not legally sell the game? I for one can legally sell the Eiffel tower, the Empire State building, and even throw in the Taj Mahal for free.

Delivering the goods I sold will be a bit hard though, but that has very little to do with the legal act of selling.

Aaanyway, as long as steam does not find ot that you sold the account you should be fine. You will however violate the user agreement that you signed. Keep in mind that the buyer might get very mad when the account is closed because of that, so do not sell the account to a friend.

 

[builer680]

"It's okay if I breach my contract, so long as I can get away with it."
"It's okay if I steal a car, so long as I forge some registration."
"It's okay if I overdraft my bank account, so long as I report my checks stolen."

I'm sure that if they really wanted to, they could afford some really awesome lawyers to try to sue you for fraud.

EDIT: Also, if they're smart, they probably keep all of the information you suggested deleting (along with a lot of other identifiable information) on file in an archive somewhere that you can't get to it.

I'm not arguing the morality of it, I'm simply stating it. Your post is moot because there is a simpler method that bypasses what you stated in your post is "required." Therefore, anyone explaining what you would have to in order to "transfer" the game, and uses as a basis for his argument the "requirement" of "transferring" it to another account, is arguing a moot point. It is not "required" in any way, shape, or form to "transfer" anything.

In this particular case, I don't really care about the extra stuff about whether someone thinks it's "right" or "wrong." There are two sides to that, after all. Besides, it's not "right" or "wrong" to lose or find login information, anyway. It just is. And Steam can keep all my "info" in an archive for all I care. The real purpose of changing/deleting it is so that anyone who "finds" the account login information later can't use it.

If Steam sues me for a post I made on a forum board, I'm sure I'll "rue the day."

 

[brxbrx]

Why can the OP not legally sell the game? I for one can legally sell the Eiffel tower, the Empire State building, and even throw in the Taj Mahal for free.

Delivering the goods I sold will be a bit hard though, but that has very little to do with

I guess it depends on your philosophical ideals on property.

 

[QuantumProjects]

Yeah, bad luck on you all. They couldn't enforce such binding contract here in Brazil, where our Code of Consumer forbids companies from restricting the right to sell a good you bought to another person, as long as you don't keep a copy for yourself.

 

[esemjay]

The issue with Steam is that it behaves more like an individual than like a corporation. "What's in this for me?", "How can I make more money?"

When you apply this logic to certain scenarios (See Fig.1) they respond in a manner that I can only compare to "common sense"+"spite." In Fig.1, someone tried to forcibly-return/steal a game from Steam, by purchasing through PayPal... then immediately cancelling the order. Steam responded by, rather than deleting the game off of his account, freezing the account under the conditions that the purchaser must pay for the game through the same PayPal account he used before.

As a general rule, if you wouldn't do it to "The Mob"... don't do it to Steam. My point with giving away an account, is... if Steam decides to get pissy about it, they could just shout "Account Sharing!" as soon as you register a new account. Downloading a few thousand songs through BitTorrent is one thing, but Steam is the iTunes of games.

Spoiler Fig.1 :

Hi guys, I feel I should highlight Steam and the methods they use to ensure you pay them.
Recently I brought a copy of BF2 through Steam, after downloading it and installing it several times I would not run, no technical support would work so I put it down to a bad download and re-downloaded it - again the same problems ocurred.

After speaking to Steam and firmly being told they don't do refunds and I wont get a penny back, I thought, well OK. I'll just get the money reversed through Paypal. Before doing this I sent them several emails saying this is what I planned to do and that they should remove the copy of BF2 from my list of games. I received no reply, so proceeded as I said I would.

I did this sucessfully, or so I thought; until I tried to log in on Wednesday to find my Steam account had been disabled and I had the following in my email inbox from Steam.

Hello Joshua,

The purchase of Battlefield 2 has been disputed by Paypal.

The Paypal account holder will need to close the dispute and have the funds returned to Steam. If the account holder is unable or unwilling to drop the dispute and let the PayPal know that the purchase is valid, and in turn have the funds returned to Steam, we will not be able to reactivate the account.

All games on your account are locked to the account and can not be transferred to a different account.

A different payment method can not be used for this game; the money must be returned by the PayPal account that made the original purchase.

If the dispute is closed and the funds are released back to Steam, the account will be reactivated. However if PayPal closes the dispute by “Reversing the Paymentâ€Â, meaning they send the funds for the purchase back to you, the Steam account will remain locked and you will lose access to all of the games on the account.

There are no options to resolve a dispute once PayPal has closed the case, so we suggest that you contact them immediately.

PayPal Help Center
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_help-ext

Please let us know if you have any further questions.


We are not able to do anything further with your account while a PayPal dispute is still pending, please remedy this issue with PayPal before asking for the account to be reactivated.

I am absolutely livid about this and after reading the TOS and Subscriber agreement thoroughly I cannot find one sentence about them being able to do this.
They're now blackmailing me into giving them back the money or I cannot access any of my other games, which probably total about £200 on there.

Does anyone know what I can do from here, I'm pretty good with copyright law because of my job, but things like Blackmail and business malpractice are new to me... Help!

If Steam sues me for a post I made on a forum board, I'm sure I'll "rue the day."

Spoiler :

You shall rue the day!!

 

[QuantumProjects]

When you apply this logic to certain scenarios (See Fig.1) they respond in a manner that I can only compare to "common sense"+"spite." In Fig.1, someone tried to forcibly-return/steal a game from Steam, by purchasing through PayPal... then immediately cancelling the order. Steam responded by, rather than deleting the game off of his account, freezing the account under the conditions that the purchaser must pay for the game through the same PayPal account he used before.

Ooooh, if they did this to me I would certainly sue them, and ask more than my money back... that's surely coercion and here in Brazil it's considered a crime against the consumer, punished with three months to a year of detention, plus fee, and the consumer can also ask for moral damage compensation (BRAZIL, Code of Consumer, article 71).

Here in Brazil we've had even a bank manager arrested for things like that.

 

[brxbrx]

The issue with Steam is that it behaves more like an individual than like a corporation. "What's in this for me?", "How can I make more money?"

err... How is that any different than a corporation's behavior?

 

[esemjay]

err... How is that any different than a corporation's behavior?

Next paragraph:

When you apply this logic to certain scenarios (See Fig.1) they respond in a manner that I can only compare to "common sense"+"spite." In Fig.1, someone tried to forcibly-return/steal a game from Steam, by purchasing through PayPal... then immediately cancelling the order. Steam responded by, rather than deleting the game off of his account, freezing the account under the conditions that the purchaser must pay for the game through the same PayPal account he used before.

 

[JollyRoger]

If you steal a car, then some dude's missing his car. This is not the case.

If you steal someone' right to distribute, then some dude's right to distribute is missing.

 

[lschnarch]

If you steal someone' right to distribute, then some dude's right to distribute is missing.

As does Steam.

 

[brxbrx]

Next paragraph:

Spite. I guess I missed that. But I don't think that's quite so different. Little people often get boxed out for not cooperating with corporations.

If you steal someone' right to distribute, then some dude's right to distribute is missing.

lol, no. you can still distribute it freely, even if someone else is.

But I get what you mean, and that's what I think is wrong with our whole society. But no use getting into that now.

 

[Airey]

...I'm angry that I not only bought more memory, but a new graphics card just to run Civ 5. All up, Civ 5 cost me $200!

I was in the exact same shoe!!!!!
I was pretty upset at the quality of Civ V initially as well.

But the part I love the most about the Civ series is the company actually cares after game releases. They monitor this forum closely and makes appropriate changes rapidly via patches.

When Civ IV first came out, it had it's problem too.
Too bad it didn't work out for you.

 

[Corei7Maniac]

You can't legally sell it.

As long as you're in the United States, you CAN legally sell the physical game media and the rights to play the game. It's called the Right of First Sale.

However, you can't share your account because then that would enable two people to play games meant to be used with one person's license. And that's against the contract you signed with Steam. Of course, I suppose you could "sell" your Steam account and never access it again...but Steam probably wouldn't like it.

So, yeah, it sucks and the legality of doing so is questionable at best.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and this advice is to be taken without a grain of salt. I am not responsible for any consequences from taking my advice.