Bethesda Softworks, known for its many wonderful games like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Dishonored, has apparently decided to threaten legal action against someone selling a sealed copy of The Evil Within 2 on the Amazon Marketplace. This might sound like an odd event, but apparently, the company is quite lucid in its thoughts and has now explained why this kind of action was taken.
Vorys, a legal firm acting on behalf of Bethesda, apparently has an issue with the Amazon Marketplace seller listing the product as "new". The specific problem is that the seller is not an authorized retailer of Bethesda games. As such, the firm is concerned, with essentially boils down to, the quality of experience, when it comes to the game being distributed by someone other than an authorized seller. If this sounds strange, you're probably in the same boat as many people following this interesting tale.
When asked about the problem during QuakeCon by Eurogamer, Pete Hines, who is the Bethesda's senior vice president of marketing and communications, had this to say:
"He's not trying to sell a secondhand game, he's trying to sell a new game. He was listing the product as if it was new. All we're saying is if it's a previously owned product, you have to sell it as a previously owned product - you cannot represent it's new because we have no way to verify what you're selling actually is new.
You could have opened it up, played it for five hours, taken whatever inserts or stuff was in there, put it back in shrink wrap. "Hey this is new." It's not new - you owned it, you bought it, so just list it as a used title. That's it, that's the end of the argument.
We're not trying to stop anybody from selling used games. People sell used games all the time - we understand that, we're not trying to stop that."
He went on to further state:
"He, specifically, was trying to list it as a new product as if he was GameStop or Best Buy... He's not a company, he's not a distributor... and we don't want our customers buying stuff from a vendor like Amazon where they think they're buying a new product and suddenly finding out they got a disc that's been played, somebody kicked across the floor and scratched and "oh they took out the insert that had the special items I was supposed to get for buying this"."
There seems to be technicalities and semantics at play here, but as you can imagine, this kind of behavior by Bethesda has not gone over well with the public. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and if the company will be victorious in making a statement.
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