“Steam users own the games they purchase and should be able to resell them when they want to, just like owners of traditional card or board games can. But while those traditional game owners can resell their games whenever they like, Steam users often cannot” said Carola Elbrecht, the VZVB's project manager for consumer rights in the digital world.

This is the second attempt by the association to deny Valve’s licensing rules at the court. The first time they tried to bring down the provisions of the contract was in 2010, when a German federal court ruled in favor of the defendant.

However, the European Court of Justice ruled in July last year that the trade of "used" software is completely legal and that the authors of the software do not have the rights to appeal on resale. While the case before the Court is somewhat different than the case VZVB brings to court, the association hopes that these two cases will have enough similarities for them to prevail.  Since this is coming from Germany, we can expect EU to potentially ban this rule of disallowing resale of bought games via Steam.

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