1. User signs up for some kind of GOO account, which will likely just be the same kind of Stardock account that the company currently offers the buyers of its own games, and register their email address.
2. User goes to Direct2Drive.com or some other download site, pays for and downloads a game and then receives a code.
3. The user boots up their new game, inputs their email address tied to their GOO account and enters in their code and then can play the game. The user would be allowed to download the game on as many computers as they want as long as they enter in their email and code at the start of every game.
What the media is currently fawning over are the implications for the sale of "used" digital downloads. According to Stardock, a player who buys a GOO DRM'd game can sell their license to another user. How this exact process works is a little bit unclear. GiantBomb insinuates that one user can directly sell a license of the game to another user. However, this does not seem possible. Let's say I have a code for one game. How would I sell this code to my friend? The code is tied to MY email address, so there would have to be some kind of official, MMO-like, transaction interface where I could put up my code and my friend would put up a certain amount of money. Should I approve the sale, the code would be transfered to him, allowing him to download and play the game and the money would go to me and and the code would no longer work for my account. Clearly, this process is extremely complicated because it would require Stardock to provide some kind of pay-pal like service on their own site in order to guarantee that the seller is payed. Joystiq on the other hand, seems to suggest that only a retailer (Stardock themselves are used in their example) could buy back a game's code. This makes more sense since retailers already have a payment model in place and, since they are presumably part of the GOO service, would be able to transfer which account owns what code themselves.
What most surprises me about this service, however, is not its feature list but the glaring holes in it that no one seems to be seeing. First off, no retailer will want to enter the "used digital download" service if they can possibly avoid it. The only reason that physical retailers sell used games in the first place is because this allows them to sell the same game twice. Their stock of games is limited and each game they sell, because it is a physical copy that cannot be duplicated easily, retains some value.
Digital games, on the other hand, have no inherent value. Valve, for example, has no limit to the amount of digital copies of Left 4 Dead it can sell. Their servers essentially have infinite copies of the game, making any given copy of the game worthless to Valve. The only reason the game has value to the end user is because of the DRM Valve puts on the game in the form of its Steam service, making the amount of copies available to gamers limited. For this reason, no publisher would ever consider buying back a used game from a customer unless they believed that customer would want to purchase that same game again. Betting that people will regret their selling decision seems like a risky proposition. Even more ridiculous than the idea that a retailer would even consider buying back a digital copy of the game is the thought that these same retailers would then sell that game a lower "used" price. WHY WOULD ANY COMPANY DO THAT? It's not like the vender is selling the same copy of the game that the just bought from the customer because they didn't buy anything other than that users license. This is how intellectual property works. The only reason Gamestop sells used games at a reduced price is because the quality of those games is lower. Yet, in this situation the "used" game is the same as a "new" game because both of these games are just copies downloaded off the vender's servers. True, users might be enticed to buy a game they wouldn't have otherwise bought had it been retail price, but at that point why not just lower the game's price across the board?
Another problem with the GOO DRM is that it seems to be easy to game. Fox suggests that the game will only validate one time, when the game file is first executed. This means that if me and my buddies wanted to, we could share an email address, sign up for one GOO account, and then share all of our codes. Because there it seems there is no check to see if the same account is playing two games at once (like Steam can, for example), there seems to be no deterrent to game sharing.
Details are still a bit sparse, but it seems as though GOO will at best be like a more open Steam (assuming they do have the kind of account checking previously described) or it will be entirely ineffectual. Currently, Stardock uses no DRM on their games and allows infinite downloads of purchased games from their website to all those who sign up for Stardock accounts, which can also be shared. I suppose I applaud their efforts to make a new, more acceptable PC game DRM, but Steam seems like they have already cracked the code for that and Stardock's idea sounds like it won't actually work. I'm sure we'll find out more when this service actually goes live.
