in

If Steam Let You Resell Your Games, Would You?

Unplayed game backlogs and Steam sales are fairly common discussions between PC gamers.  At GrownGaming, we’ve written about the difficulty of avoiding Steam sales, the lack of time that we have to play the ridiculous number of games we own, and getting organised to beat the backlog.  The struggle is real.

But, what if we could resell the games sitting in our libraries?

As reported by Gamasutra earlier this month, a French court has ruled against Valve at the close of a 2015 case, finding that some aspects of Steam operate on several policies that are anti-consumer and arguably illegal.  Valve has plans to appeal the decision and won’t be making any changes until the case is closed for good, but there is the potential that games could be resold on Steam – at least in countries within the European Union.

I have 234 games in my Steam library (and many more spread across Origin, Epic Games Store, UPlay, GOG, etc.).  Of those, ‘only’ 116 are not hidden.  Those are the games I have convinced myself that I will actually play.  The other 118 games have either had their time, or were purchased on a whim and I’ve had to accept that I’ll never get around to installing them.  My total spend on Steam is $673.23 according to Valve (you can see yours, too) – though that doesn’t take into account that I’ve bought the majority of my games via other websites and redeemed the keys.  (Never G2A, though.)

Would I sell my games if I could?  Yes.

I would love to start with a clean slate and only purchase games when I’m actually going to play them.  Having a pipeline of games to play is pointless in an age when more games are released every single day than any human being could ever aspire to experience.  It just isn’t possible.

If I could get 50% of the current value of the games in my library, I would sell every game I have in a heartbeat.  It would represent a significant loss, but isn’t that basically what console players do at the end of a generation, anyway?

Would you sell your unwanted Steam games if you had the choice?

5 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. I’m sure that exists – I know that people sell accounts they’ve loaded with games from stolen credit cards/review keys.

    But if Steam had a button to sell the games on a market place and they take a cut, it would be something I’d strongly consider.

  2. Imagine every Steam sale everyone emptying out their library then buying a bunch more games they will never have time for, repeating the cycle endlessly until they only have one game. The game that they will finally play.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Written by John

I'm a 35-year-old gamer, clinging onto the gamepad despite real-life responsibilities trying to pull me kicking and screaming away. I created GrownGaming to meet other adult gamers. Nice to meet you.