this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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A good start. We need a lot more of this.
An important one is passing on digital goods after the death of the store.
Maybe I want to pass a game to somebody else without me needing to die first?
Hell, why not even pass a game from my account on PSN to my Steam account or vice versa?
With legislation, much of this becomes reality. None of it is technically impossible. it's just nobody wants to do it. Publishers don't really care where you buy a game, they still got paid. The stores want to be the arbiters of all.
There is a caveat though with digital goods. The provider is incurring a cost so they naturally want to be the ones getting paid. If you buy the game on PSN, then transfer and download on steam, valve is loosing money while Sony got money but provided no service. The publisher doesn't care, the provider of the goods does very much.
Valve already allows you to buy a game elsewhere and get a Steam code though, so there's precedent there for how much it likely costs them (i.e. not much).
There is a limit that you're not allowed to sell codes directly cheaper than on Steam (which is fair enough), but most of my Steam library is from Humble Bundles and the like.
It's certainly not costing any of them 30% to provide downloads.
You could of course have fair use limits on the movement of your games, so you're not transferring them about just because you can't be arsed to go upstairs to your PC or whatever.
And not just games. Music and video should also have better ownership rights.
I would bet humble bundles pays a fee to provide steam keys.
Every single game download costs valve ~0¢ but all of them together costs them millions.
The current system is not fair and reasonable to consumers. Allowing free transfers wouldn't be fair to the stores.
I for sure know which version I prefer, but I'm just saying there is a reasonable, good faith argument against free/unlimited transfers