
Questions on the Bethesda reselling drama - lambada
https://www.meganwalker.me.uk/2018/08/questions-on-the-bethesda-reselling-drama/
======
fefe23
I have two questions.

First, if the product is unopened, how will Bethesda know the warranty does
not apply? I have bought a number of products that came with a registration
card that I was supposed to send in so I could get the warranty. In the case
of PC games, I'd assume the warranty kicks in if you tie the game to your
steam account. No idea how this works for consoles. But this has clearly not
happened yet.

Second question: What warranty? Are you f'ing kidding me? Bethesda has been
shipping horrendously buggy games for as long as anyone can remember. You buy
them at your own peril. After a few years of patches from Bethesda and the
community (google for unofficial skyrim patch) the games become playable. But
it's not like you get the patches on warranty after complaining to Bethesda.
You get them automatically. Because otherwise nobody would buy those games in
the first place. If there is a warranty from Bethesda, I would be very
interesting in finding out its terms.

As far as I know, nobody has ever gotten their money back from Bethesda
because the game was too buggy. Bug people have gotten their money back from
Steam when returning a buggy game. So Steam actually does offer a warranty
that is actually worth something.

It is worth noting that Steam had to be guilt-tripped into offering that
warranty by too many shitty, buggy or outright fraudulently marketed games.
This was not a day one feature.

~~~
klez
I think the warranty covers factory defects on the physical disc, i.e. if the
disc is unreadable they send you a working copy.

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hprotagonist
Isn’t this trivially mooted by
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc).
?

 _The Court held that the first sale doctrine applies to goods manufactured
outside of the United States, and the protections and exceptions offered by
the Copyright Act to works "lawfully made under this title" is not limited by
geography. Rather, it applies to all copies legally made anywhere, not just in
the United States, in accordance with U.S. copyright law. So, wherever a copy
of a book is first made and sold, it can be resold in the U.S. without
permission from the publisher._

~~~
tgb
There was some decent discussion about that earlier on HN [1].

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17739631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17739631)

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lambada
Archive link if needed:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180812140408/https://www.megan...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180812140408/https://www.meganwalker.me.uk/2018/08/questions-
on-the-bethesda-reselling-drama/)

(My website may not survive the HN hug of death).

—-

I made this because I feel there’s some interesting questions and implications
this raises specifically because it’s going after unauthorised sellers who
market their goods as new.

I specifically did not try to answer all the questions I’ve raised because for
most of them I don’t have a definitive answer, or possibly even what it should
be. I’m interested to see discussion on these points though!

~~~
joveian
It is a good point. There are a few industries where companies tend to be
really strict about who you buy from and will refuse to honor warranty from
unautorized sellers (headphones, other than the least expensive, are one that
I came across recently). Many others require some kind of proof of purchase
and I would guess most people realize that if you get something on ebay there
is a good chance that the manufacturer will not honor the warranty. Sometimes
this is just due to time limiting considerations (if something has a year
warranty and you buy it and sell it unopened a year later should the person
who buys it get a year warranty?) and sometimes the company wants to limit the
warranty to the first person who buys it.

IMO, warranty needs to be considered independent of if an item is new or not
and any company who has a problem with how Amazon is representing that should
go after Amazon and not random third party sellers. I would also strongly
support companies being required to either honor warranty on items that are
resold new or specify a warranty period independent of when or where it is
bought that is listed on the product. Many companies do everything they can to
make sure the warranty sounds great when you buy while making every excuse to
not honor it later. "Authorized Sellers" are just one part of that.

------
keypusher
This may be related to Bethesda transitioning to distributing its PC games
directly via Bethesda.net and cutting out middlemen such as Steam. They want
to capture the full price of a retail copy, and to do that they are cutting
out resellers on all platforms to drive people towards their own new platform.

[https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-wont-launch-on-
steam/](https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-wont-launch-on-steam/)

