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.
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.