With the new Steam Trading system warming up, recently opening up its doors to its beta, questions now of used games trading have been raised. Steam Trading basically allows players to trade in-game items for other virtual goods within a secure and legitimate framework. Obviously, this opens up their service to wider opportunity, such as eventually allowing trade-ins of used games. Question is: will Steam bite into that?

In a recent interview, Gabe Newell discussed on their ongoing considerations for this idea, basically conceding that they're pretty much unsure as of yet as to which direction they're going to be heading to.

"We need to hire an economist, because we keep bumping into these issues," he began. "You're starting to look at weird issues like currencny and inflation and productivity and asset values and liquidity of asset categories. We just wish we were smarter about this stuff. We're reading frantically. We're brushing up, and all we're doing is convincing ourselves that we're more stupid.

Half the time people are saying, oh, well, illiquid assets inherently have a penalty, so this argues for trade-ability, that we're essentially becoming a Russian currency model in the 1970s. Everybody races off to try to read papers on the implications of that.

We think we want to move in the direction where everything is an item of exchange. We just aren't totally sure how to do that right. We're sure there are economists out there who understand this really well. We feel like we're this third-world developing country. We've discovered rocks! And we've discovered sticks! And there's this other thing out there and we should move our economy in that direction. There must be somebody at the World Bank who can tell us what we ought to be doing. We just don't know what that is yet."

It's understandable, of course, why Valve would want to work out details of this proposed system with an economist. There are just way too many considerations to work out, such as that of licensing. Basically, what Steam provides is an avenue for gamers to enjoy a game or a product through their service. This does not entail, however, provision of ownership of the product as a software as that is reserved to the publishers and developers.

What gamers have, therefore, is the mere right to make use of the game and own its physical or virtual copy, but not the software itself. With the trading system on Steam, however, this would presume that owners of used copies of games will have the same power to transfer licenses amongst themselves. 

Within the context of Steam, it would seem that the most feasible setup is for them to handle the transferring of the license by removing it from one's account. Of course, we know it can't be as simple as that, because when it comes to licensing rights, nothing is ever that simple.

For digital consumers, however, it should prove to be a very viable option. After alll, if owners of physical copies can trade-in their games, why shouldn't digital owners do the same? It's a different ballpark, yes, but the concept behind it is essentially the same. At this point, the only thing certain is that it gives Steam a heavy onus to do this the right way. 

After all, if the trends are proven right, that we are all moving the way of the digital, then trade-ins of used games bought from service providers such as Steam should be commonplace in the near future.

Via [Eurogamer]

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