I’d like to get the community’s feedback on this. I find it very disturbing that digital content purchased on a platform does not rightfully belong to the purchaser and that the content can be completely removed by the platform owners. Based on my understanding, when we purchase a show or movie or game digitally, what we’re really doing is purchasing a “license” to access the media on the platform. This is different from owning a physical copy of the same media. Years before the move to digital media, we would buy DVDs and Blu-Rays the shows and movies we want to watch, and no one seemed to question the ownership of those physical media.
Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn’t the same as purchasing and owning the physical media? How did it become like this, and is there anything that can be done to convince these platforms that purchasing a digital copy of a media should be equivalent to purchasing a physical DVD or Blu-Ray disc?
P.S. I know there’s pirating and all, but that’s not the focus of my question.
Im gonna use a bad word, but NFTs would help with this issue
True digital ownership thats censor proof is pretty legit imo
Nfts don’t give you ownership over anything but the nft itself. Everything else is a license system that says, “You can have this because you have an nft,” you know, the exact same system we have now but will more bullshit .
It’s quite amazing that these people don’t realize that they’re just reinventing DRM, but worse.
Less shit. You could actually trade your fucking games and would not be limited to one platform
you’re still limited to one platform, the vendor has to recognise the NFT, and vendors are only going to recognise their own NFT’s that they saw value from selling.
there is no benefit to bullshit NFT tokens, unless you are running a ponzi scheme.
Then those games would be subject to Gresham’s law LMAO. I would never trust a company that allows transfers between platforms.
Why would allowing transfer between platforms be a bad thing? You wouldn’t necessarily have to be able to buy on any given platform, but it could be the case that the license allows use on multiple different platforms.
You would have a platform to trade games, and another to keep them. The trading platform will be able to undercut the holding platform due to practices such as exclusivity deals. This, in turn, will make the holding platform require a commission fee whenever a game is transferred to it.
If you could get a game for free in the Epic store and transfer it to Steam, where does Steam get the money from?
If you can transfer / buy everywhere, how would there be any exclusivity, though?
Platforms are all already dealing with the possibility that they don’t make money but still have to distribute the games. If you bought a game for $0.99 on Steam 15 years ago, and you download it today, they’re not making money off you. If you download a F2P game via Steam and never buy anything, they lose money. Hell, I’ve never bought anything on Steam, but I’ve probably downloaded terabytes of data from them. They’re not making money on me, except maybe with ads (which would apply to this other scenario too).
The platforms also already have to deal with the issue of not getting paid because you bought / got the game somewhere else. You can buy from GMG, etc. and then download from Steam. And publishers give away games frequently during anniversaries, etc. that you then download from Steam or Epic.
My thinking is that the platforms would obviously want to make money, so they’re going to price compete to make sure you buy it there instead of buying it somewhere else and downloading it from there.
I also think an inevitable outcome of digital distribution in general is that companies are going to start charging for downloads. Digital games are one time purchases requiring lifetime support. They’re not going to let it work that way forever.
Will I suppose that’s where we gotta disagree then. I cannot ever imagine exclusivity deals going away. Unless we somehow manage to get a government-subsidized middleman to track and enforce parity, you’ll always have platforms attracting prospective developers with exclusivity deals. Then you don’t have to compete with pricing at all!
As for your last point, I believe most gamers would tell any company charging for downloads to fuck off. But I can see this actually happening in the future.
You know, I’ve routinely been surprised what gamers do and don’t put up with, so I really don’t know what to expect anymore.
I dunno if you remember how gamers responded when Steam came out, but they really, really hated it. And it wasn’t just the issues with slow internet, bugs in Steam, and stuff like that. They seemed to kinda philosophically hate it. Even the gaming magazines ran articles about how it ruined software ownership, it was awful how it made it so that you couldn’t even do things like give your old games to your kids or your friends, etc. And gamer forums had the same kinda complaints. And it was even worse since Valve forced people to start using Steam to keep playing CS, even though CS had previously not required Steam.
But fast forward to some years later, and nobody cares about any of that stuff. Well, I guess they do sometimes. People complained about Epic moving Rocket League to EGS, which was kinda funny since it was moving from a service that had, years prior angered people when it started being required for a different hit multiplayer game.
Anyway, I could see gamers complaining and then just getting onboard 5-10 years later. That’s what they usually do if the developers they like push for it.
The NFT is the item though, and it can be easily resold
So? If the licence holder wanted, they could just put an option in for you to sell what you have. The nft does not matter. It is not needed and is just added bullshit
How do you think they can force me to sell?
Force? No one said force. I am talking about something like steam letting you sell your game. They could if they wanted and it doesn’t need nfts. Nfts are just bullshit coins that serve no real purpose.
Everything you might claim you can do with nfts, you can do today without nfts, or it’s a ponzi scheme.
NFTs are a necessary prerequisite for trading games with peers without being locked into some bullshit monopoly like steam community trading
you’re still locked in because the licence provider has to recognise the NFT, the lock-in is with the licence provider. all the NFT is, is a ticket that says “I’m allowed”.
it’s the exact same thing but will added bullshit.
if you want a tradable token that doesn’t require lock-in, that token has to have intrinsic value. Like with a physical disk with a movie on it. there is no lock-in to a vendor system, it’s got everything it needs right there. it has intrinsic value.
NFT’s are a bullshit ticket that says “please give me access, you pwomised”, that you can sell if you want. but you could just do the same thing inside the vendors own system and it’s all exactly the same because the vendor has to say yes/no in the end, as the nft has no value.
This to me would be the potential big benefit. One of the problems right now is that there really isn’t an organization that everyone would trust to just hold onto their licenses without demanding some kind of exclusivity, etc. If Valve is the one holding your license to Borderlands 3, they’re not gonna let you play on Epic using that license. They want you to use their services.
If there’s a third party that is just in charge of licenses, and those licenses work everywhere, that basically makes launcher exclusivity impossible and also makes it so that licenses continue to live even if the launcher dies.
For the record, I think NFTs / Blockchain solutions are typically the stupidest shit in the world, but there was a Blockchain game licensing proposal some years back, and it actually would have avoided some of the vendor lock-in / licenses evaporating when the vendor dies type issues we’re dealing with now.
The problem is just that none of the publishers or launchers would ever play ball with the idea. They stand to make more money by not playing nicely with everyone else.
Tbh, the best use case for NFTs in games is IN games. Items, weapons, skins etc would be amazing if they were x-platform and interoperable with many diff games. Imagine using Stormbreaker in Elden Ring without mods, just by importing a weapon OBJ file.
A movie is not an NFT…
Or just let us download the actual game/movie/song like the good old days.
That’s what GOG lets you do for games.
I didnt know you could download from GoG, thought it was all in browser. Thats pretty sick tbh
GOG is a last bastion of freedom LOL.
If people want to screw devs by pirating games, they’re just going to do that and it’s pretty clear there’s nothing you can do about it
Yeah, thats what I did when I bought my NFT game and some NFT mp3s. They ares in my wallet and I can play/ listen forever, steam or Microsoft or epic or google or whatever can never take it away from me.
Where are the streams being hosted though, or where do you download them from? From my understanding, the biggest problem with NFTs is that the NFT itself is nothing more than a token on the blockchain that states you own something, but the files themselves are hosted elsewhere, so if the service hosting the file stops existing, you are left with a token that points to nothing.
Depends on the item, the platform its being sold on, etc, but I believe most NFTs are hosted on the IPFS platform which is censor resistant
Some NFTs actually point to physical objects and have the digital token as a “certificate of authenticity”. Ive got a holographic skate deck from a EDM artist shipped to me, has an NFC badge on it for more goodies in the future
The tech is pretty cool, imo, and has a lot of modern use cases.
So… you have the full game encoded in an NFT? That sounds like a shit ton of overhead.
No… just the licence
So what’s the difference? You just reinvented DRM
You can trade digital games with anyone with no third party involvement