Retail boxed Steam activated games: can they be resold?

Question

I recently purchased retail boxed versions of

• Dead Island (which is awesome)
• Warhammer 40k: Space Marine (not so much)

I finished both games and I was thinking of reselling them or giving them to a friend to play. However, these are both Steam activated games that had a required Steam registration code I had to enter -- and validate on Steam -- as part of the installation.

If I give these games to a friend or resell them, will they even work? Is the registration code single use and tied to a single person / computer / Steam account?

Answer

As both of the answers above state, once the game is registered with the account, it's tied to it and that's that.

However, an option that I have read about people taking is that for every single game, they create a new email address / steam account and register that game with that address. Then when they get in a situation where they are ready to get rid of it, they sell the steam account and the email account.

All in all, not very convenient, but it works.

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